My father was born on a threshing day in July 1919, in the same Iowa farmhouse in which his own father had been born. The house had been built, in part, by his grandfather. Uprooted from northern Germany because of the military draft, the family had become deeply rooted in this small, close-knit community in America. Most still spoke only their native dialect of Low German, went to one of several one-room schoolhouses scattered across the prairie, ground and sold grain at the same granaries, traded at the same stores, and married and socialized exclusively within the social ambit of the church.
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My father was born on a threshing day in July 1919, in the same Iowa farmhouse in which his own father had been born. The house had been built, in part, by his grandfather. Uprooted from northern Germany because of the military draft, the family had become deeply rooted in this small, close-knit community in America. Most still spoke only their native dialect of Low German, went to one of several one-room schoolhouses scattered across the prairie, ground and sold grain at the same granaries, traded at the same stores, and married and socialized exclusively within the social ambit of the church.
The school my father and his two sisters attended was also just one room; in a memoir he wrote shortly before his death, he recalls “screwed-down seats, a potbelly stove, a recitation bench, and the teacher’s desk, besides which was a flag and above which were the familiar clock and George Washington’s portrait.” The school had one modest bookshelf containing reference books and a few novels, by Dickens, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather. Little was expected of the students or, for that matter, the teacher, who had only to maintain “order among the larger denim-bibbed farm boys for the whole day.” Students were taught a little English, but for most it was barely enough to make the transition to the high school in the county seat five miles away. My father almost dropped out of school when his first high-school report card recorded two D’s and two F’s. His uncle, a town dweller, persuaded him to stay in school, because he knew my father had been born with a heart condition that meant he would not have the physical stamina to work on the farm; he was what the family called a “stubble-cat” (late-born kittens that generally died). By his senior year he was getting all A’s, and was encouraged to go to the state university so he could come back home as a businessman.
My grandfather forbade him to go to that “godless” university. He allowed him instead to go to the church college in Dubuque for the express purpose of preparing for the ministry. The ministry was the only profession my grandfather would accept aside from working the land. But as my father studied theology outside the strict confines of the German Presbyterian Church, learning that his personal journey from the hard convictions of Dutch Reformed belief to a world beyond the flat Iowa farmland reflected a larger history of contemporary thought, he decided he wanted to teach rather than preach.
This was an amendment to his agreement that his father deemed acceptable. It meant that he had to move away from the seminary at Dubuque to a more advanced Presbyterian seminary in Chicago, and then further east to Yale, known in divinity circles at the time for preparing students to teach in seminaries rather than solely to become ministers.
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After receiving his degree in divinity, my father transferred to Columbia, and studied with Paul Tillich at Union Theological Seminary along with a group of Columbia philosophers who were still under the influence of John Dewey. He taught Western civilization in Columbia’s core curriculum for undergraduates and worked at the Columbia campus ministry on the chaplaincy staff. Once he completed his dissertation, on the transcendentalist theologian Theodore Parker, he was increasingly drawn to contemporary European theological debates. He wanted to see if he could reconcile a reformed understanding of the nature and character of God with his residual sense of the importance of the church and the role of Scripture in constituting the Christian community. Not unrelatedly, he was also interested in exploring how the “idea of the university” was playing a crucial role in the secularization debates in Europe, as it had for him in his own personal biography. He became preoccupied with how theologians turned to philosophy to modernize the tenets of their Christian convictions, in the process seeking to balance the gravitational pull of faith with the centrifugal force of new and ever-changing knowledge.
As early as his time in college, he had been taken by a new wave of theological revisionism, in which the Bible was no longer viewed as literal truth but instead as a compelling ethical vision for life in the world. He moved gradually toward a form of belief that rendered God as an abstract ontological bulwark for existence in the world, with the church as an expression of community. This Christian community was not simply an assemblage of individuals professing their own salvation, but rather a social group that collectively affirmed its faith through acts in the world. European theologians were wrestling with the weight of tradition, fashioning a new moral philosophical framework for a Christianity they devoutly wanted to be relevant in and for life in the 20th century.
Many of those theologians had in fact grown up as sons of ministers, and they were literally working to free themselves from the oppressive faith of their fathers. Some of the philosophers and theologians who most captivated my father — Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, Tillich, and the Niebuhr brothers, for example — were sons of conservative pastors. The secularization of mid-20th-century Protestant theology was at once generational and civilizational, predicated on the crisis produced by a loss of tradition and faith (and, for that matter, of faith in tradition). Protestant theology of the time was so urgent precisely because it sought to replace the old and increasingly discredited (and unbelievable) tenets of faith with a view of the world that accepted new knowledge, while still providing access to a sense of meaning in life — with the church as the community locus of that meaning.
After the ordeal of ordination in his home church, in Holland, Iowa, where he was grilled on Scripture and accused of having picked up the “taint of the East,” my father returned to New York “with a sense of joy and space.” He wrote that the city, not the open farmland of his home, had the “larger horizons I yearned for.” Marilynne Robinson captures the feel of my father’s Iowa in her extraordinary novel Gilead, in which an aging Iowa minister writes to his son:
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Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view. To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded … This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more.
My father had felt that weariness acutely, and found hope in the new horizons — the social adornments and the theological adventurousness, the mountains and oceans — of both the East Coast and Europe.
While spending a sabbatical year at the National Council of Churches, in 1953, he founded a journal that seemed to capture the full force of his new intellectual and institutional mission: The Christian Scholar. While the new journal was about the life of religion in the university, it began with a lively sense of the tension between religious belief and academic knowledge. It was designed not just to explore but to mediate any sense of contradiction between the two. Under my father’s editorial pen, the journal sought to assert that Christian belief could be fully realized within the modern university, while also pushing the university to realize its own mission, breaking down barriers within the university to free and open exchange. My father emphasized the freedom of the Christian scholar to take on any question, limited only by an abiding commitment to knowledge. The Christian Scholar treated the questions of the academy as completely open, enhanced rather than constrained by the simultaneous commitment to ethical values and the belief that learning functioned as an instrument of God’s ultimate wisdom.
Under my father’s editorial pen, the journal sought to assert that Christian belief could be fully realized within the modern university.
The journal, housed at the Yale Divinity School, where my father taught during those years, captured a shift in the worldview of Protestant intellectuals who were confronting not just the general process of secularization but also the changing character of the postwar university. There was a sense of a vocation to be in the world, to take matters of faith seriously, not just for the sake of the faithful but also because faith — rather than existing in some kind of irreconcilable tension with knowledge — had important things to offer to the university, even as the university had important things to offer to the faithful. The Christian Scholar named and then gave voice to concerns that came out of theology but were now really about the university itself: about how the mission of Christian intellectuals required that they take the institution of the university as seriously as they took the institution of the church, how both teaching and scholarship were critical domains of religious investment in the world.
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In a way, my father was saying that for him the university was his new church. For a man who had left his Iowa farm only to become a minister, the journal publicly affirmed his new vocation. He was fulfilling his pledge to his father after all.
My father’s generation of Protestant academics acknowledged that they had no choice but to accept the secularizing trends they encountered, though they also believed that a religious perspective would ensure that the university maintained its role as a moral force in society. More and more, however, they displaced their moral fervor from theology per se onto the humanities writ large. The interwar years had witnessed the development in many American universities of “core” curricula that combined some version of the “great books” with a mission of providing a moral if now secular educational base for undergraduate teaching. Those years also saw the rise of the idea of the humanities as a linked cluster of disciplines that supported the moral aspirations of an increasingly secular educational landscape.
Building on the classical conventions of 19th-century moral education, as well as on the subsequent developments of what more broadly became denominated as philology, the humanities secured for themselves a solid place in a curriculum that was beginning to branch much more aggressively into the social, natural, and physical sciences. The critics Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter have shown how the rise of the modern humanities took place in the context of these two related developments: first, the demise of core Christian (Protestant) values as the base for moral education, and second, a growing worry about the rise of the research university itself. The humanities became the cluster of departments and courses that was fashioned as a modern substitute for religious values.
The humanities were defended most vigorously by those who were concerned not just about secularization but about the need to enshrine and preserve Western civilization, while protecting against the effects of the research university, with its growing emphasis on science and technology, specialized disciplinary knowledge, and the loss of humanist values. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the young and outspoken president of the University of Chicago, told a university convocation in 1933 that “the keys which were to open the gates of heaven have let us into a larger but more oppressive prison house. We think those keys were science and the intelligence of man. They have failed us.” Hutchins chose the great books instead. Such critiques hardly faded away after the Second World War. As the historian Andrew Jewett writes in Science Under Fire (2020), “In the 1950s and early 1960s, a remarkably broad array of mainline Protestants, humanities scholars, conservative political commentators, and even establishment liberals joined theological conservatives in arguing that science represented a moral, and even existential, threat to civilization.”
Those concerns paved the way for, and were then vastly exacerbated by, the political explosions of the late 1960s and ’70s. The military-industrial complex was linked by many student activists and faculty critics to big science, the malign influence of science and engineering in university life, and the extent to which faith in science had led social scientists to embrace false ideas of objectivity and neutrality. Even after the Vietnam War ended and protests ceased, new struggles over broadening the curriculum to include serious attention to African Americans and race, the rise of feminism, and ethnic studies roiled many campuses, leading critics such as Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball to complain bitterly that the university had lost its way.
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Many more recent jeremiads about the degradation caused by research universities echo those earlier objections and concerns, though now in reaction primarily to the culture wars of the preceding decades. These critics continue, however, to lament the authority that had been conceded not only to the research enterprise of the university but specifically to science and technology. As Anthony Kronman, a former dean of the Yale Law School, puts it characteristically in Education’s End (2007), “the pre-eminent authority of science is the central fact of our age, and the collapse of the authority of the humanities within our colleges and universities is in part a consequence of the authority that science possesses outside them.” While “the modern sciences of nature surpass all other modes of human knowledge,” nevertheless “we need the humanities to meet the deepest spiritual longing of our age.” He concludes by calling for colleges to become “the spiritual leaders they once were and that all of us, teachers, students, parents, citizens of the republic, need for them to be again.”
Kronman’s new faith is in the kind of “secular humanism” that he believes is taught through great-books programs, whether in Yale’s directed-studies program, Columbia’s and Chicago’s core curricula, or similar curricular requirements at colleges such as Reed, St. Olaf, and St. John’s. Although he seeks to restore what he sees as the rightful place of the humanities, he is deeply critical of the recent turn to “political correctness” in humanistic disciplines, a cancer from within rather than an infection from the world of science and technology. But he avers that even that turn took place, and then took hold, in part because of the insidious effects of the rise of research. “By accepting the imperatives of the research ideal and arranging their work to meet its demands,” Kronman argues, “humanities teachers have therefore traded a valuable and distinctive authority for one based upon values they can never hope to realize to anything like the degree their colleagues in the natural and social sciences can.” Ideas of diversity and multiculturalism crept into the vacuum created by this crisis of confidence, “because they seemed to offer an antidote to the emptiness produced by the humanities’ own endorsement of the research ideal.”
One might counter that it was precisely the continued vitality of the humanities that led them not just to overlap increasingly with the social sciences, but also to include in their purview the study of slavery, exploitation, empire, and inequality, as well as considerations of exclusions based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, and other insurgent identities. As the culture wars heated up in the 1970s and ’80s, when the struggles over civil rights for African Americans and equal rights for women began to be incorporated into college and university curricula in systematic ways, the backlash to those movements resorted to 19th-century justifications for the importance of moral education. When Bloom’s TheClosing of the American Mind became a New York Times best seller in the late 1980s, it was less because of his arguments that classical philosophy was the only worthy discipline for undergraduate education than because of a widespread ideological conviction that young people’s minds were being poisoned by “tenured radicals” teaching them revolution, disruption, and perversity. Critics then and now railed against what they saw as the yawning moral vacuum created by new social movements.
The secularization of humanistic thought, a development that was first driven by the loss of political power and authority of the dominant Protestant elite and then propelled by the social movements that dominated American cultural and political life in the second half of the 20th century, did in fact raise hard questions about the place of culture in higher education. As “high culture” was dethroned, we began to see a precipitous decline in the prestige and allure of the humanities, what the literary critic Simon During has described as a second loss of faith. For During, this second phase of “cultural secularization” was in part the result of neoliberalism’s devaluation of cultural literacy as economic currency and in part the consequence of the critical reduction of all cultural products to their immediate conditions of production, use, and valuation. While During argues for the necessary relationship of humanistic thinking to political critique and resistance, he is concerned that social reductionism will vitiate the potential of all culture (high or low) to be available for general aesthetic experience as well as philosophical reflection.
Cultural secularization has occasioned a growing moral panic not just because of the dismantling of canons but because the theoretical currents that have been responsible for this have chipped away both at the very idea of universal truth and value and the loss of traditional authority to define those truths and values. Beginning with the cultural relativism advocated by the anthropologist Franz Boas in the early 20th century and students of his such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, new intellectual movements morphed into the relativism around even the most secure of epistemological pillars — science — in the work of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Bruno Latour. Many feared that the universe itself had become fundamentally unstable.
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Even as Boas had in fact been steeped in universal ideas of science and Kuhn always rejected the label of relativism, other social and cultural theorists in the postwar world added multiple lenses for seeing the world in wildly divergent ways. Along the way, humanistic disciplines were often captured either by narrow topical or methodological concerns, building on the philological turn of the 19th century, or by a growing consensus that critique (in the sense of emphasizing the negative and the nefarious through the systematic unmasking of aesthetic forms and old orthodoxies) was the only ethical approach to works of culture. Inevitably, when post-structuralism became associated with these traditions of critique (and often forms of Nietzschean nihilism as well) in the 1970s and ’80s, what at the time were the most intellectually exciting tendencies in the humanities were ill equipped to take center stage in broader curricular debates, either for those who harbored left political views or for those who continued to hold onto the desire to translate religious conviction into a secular idiom. On the one side, there was a growing reaction to the murky politics of deconstruction; on the other, many believed that the apotheosis of philology into endless wordplay exposed the moral limits of critical theory. And yet by this time it was far too late to return to the moral certainties of earlier eras, whether the worship of great ideas as only vaguely disguised religious musings by Allan Bloom or Harold Bloom, or for that matter anyone else defending the exclusive pedagogical utility of “great books.”
Those of us with affiliations to the humanities and humanistic social sciences still have no clear alternative, even as we continue to worry about our growing irrelevance in the eyes of our students (and their parents and prospective employers), not to mention our university administrators, as we agonize about what it will take to restore our proper place in the university. On occasion we argue that an emphasis on the creative arts will be helpful for developing an entrepreneurial spirit or suggest other ways in which the humanities have practical ends, including the teaching of values around civic participation and democratic life. Others decry those instrumental arguments, searching all the while for new ways to justify what so many think of as either irrelevant or, at best, luxuries for the rich (and those attending the richest institutions). Have the humanities finally come to the end of the road?
I think back to the time of my father and his secularizing colleagues, when a generation of deeply religious thinkers confronted a similar moment of disenchantment and grave concern about their place in a changing institutional ecosystem. They worked to develop genuinely ecumenical ways of embracing the university and the communities of scholars and students who made it up. In the wake of Joseph McCarthy’s assault on left politics in American life, not only did they adopt the struggle for civil rights as central to their developing sense of the “social gospel”; they also committed themselves to social justice around foreign as well as domestic policy, long before social justice became an expression of identity politics. My father was also part of a group that turned to the developing world for inspiration on how to imagine a religious vocation under postcolonial conditions, struggling to find new idioms that married Christian ideals with local imperatives.
In retrospect, it is that spirit of ecumenism that seems to have largely disappeared, the commitment to using what would once have seemed an oxymoron (as in, Christian scholar) to ground some of the most profound explorations of what it is to live lives with meaning in a modern world. At a time of such heightened political, cultural, and intellectual polarization, it could, perhaps, hardly be otherwise. And yet, one wonders if the future of the humanities doesn’t depend in some fundamental sense precisely on the capacity to take a more ecumenical approach to cultural artifacts, intellectual traditions, political positions, and ideological debates. If we could find ways to translate this hope and openness into a more contemporary idiom, surely the humanities would again be central for all the roads ahead.
Portions of this essay are drawn from City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University, recently out from Cambridge.