Guest Blogger: What Should Colleges Do With Their Chapels?

Controversy engulfed the Wren Chapel at the College of William and Mary. (Margaret Grubiak photo)

This past February, Gene R. Nichol resigned after less than three years as president of the College of William and Mary. While multiple controversies contributed to this brief tenure—a sex workers’ art show at the college was one of them—Mr. Nichol’s decision in 2006 to remove an 18-inch brass cross from permanent display in the historic Wren Chapel touched a raw nerve over the role of religion on campus.

The chapel’s interior

At its root was a struggle that pitted welcoming diversity against honoring the college’s Christian past and present. Founded as an Anglican institution in 1693, William and Mary became a state-sponsored college in 1906. At the 100th anniversary of this private-to-public turn, President Nichol removed the cross from permanent display after hearing accounts that some non-Christian college members felt deeply uncomfortable with the cross’s presence in a space regularly used for nonreligious college events. Mr. Nichol, himself a Christian, decided that the college community must define itself not in terms of insiders and outsiders, but of full members.

The decision quickly became a controversy with political overtones. Conservatives lambasted the liberal emphasis on diversity and tolerance at the cost of Christian expression. Those in favor of the cross’s remaining in the chapel argued that its removal sounded another death knell for Christianity on the campus, and another confirmation of secularization in American life.

Four months after the cross’s disappearance from the chapel table, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized a debate in the chapel titled “Religion in the Campus: Should the Cross be Reinstated in the Wren Chapel?” Arguing the negative was David L. Holmes, a professor of religious studies at the college. Mr. Holmes rested his case on the idea that the cross’s removal was not only fine but also appropriate, given that the cross was not original to the chapel or even to Christian worship. Crosses had become a common part of Protestant churches only in the 19th century, he argued, and this particular cross had been present in the Wren Chapel only since the 1930s.

A conservative commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, argued the affirmative position, phrasing the debate this way: “The real issue here is, Should the public square be totally secular, with Christianity driven out of it, or is tolerance a two-way street in which Christians and non-Christians both have access to public space?”

Mr. D’Souza’s mention of public space was an interesting moment in a debate otherwise focused on a mobile religious symbol. The Wren Chapel carries the hallmarks of a Christian space. The chapel has a pulpit and a ceremonial table, or altar, and it mimics the chapels at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford with choir-style seating (installed in a 1930s renovation). Religious and nonreligious ceremonies are held here precisely because Wren Chapel is thought of as a place set apart, a sacred space.

Can the removal of a cross, without any other changes, make a chapel a public space, successfully welcoming all kinds of belief and even unbelief? Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, thought not. He argued that President Nichol’s desire to welcome everyone “would require not just a stripping of the altar, but a shuttering of the chapel.”

“After all,” Mr. Gingrich said, “if the presence of a cross in the chapel signals that non-Christians are less than full members of the community, then the presence of a chapel on a public campus must similarly signal that nonbelievers are somehow outsiders.”

Whatever your opinion of Mr. Gingrich, he makes a provocative point about religious space on the campus. How far do colleges and universities have to go to accommodate multiple beliefs and nonbelief? How do institutions with a Christian past—and Christian spaces—alter their campuses to reflect identities where Christianity no longer plays a central role? What should you do with a chapel in changed times?

William and Mary’s resolution of the controversy provides one answer to these vexing questions. The cross has been returned to the Wren Chapel, but not on the central table. Rather, it is displayed in a transparent box on a stand against the chapel wall—it is presented as a historic relic. The college has yet to act on one student’s suggestion during the Holmes-D’Souza debate that an 18-inch bronze question mark be displayed in the chapel to account for all those who describe themselves as undeclared, unclassified, or having no religion at all. —Margaret Grubiak

Margaret Grubiak, this month’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is an assistant professor of architectural history in the humanities department at Villanova University. You can read her previous post here.