Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe

Even at elite colleges, doors are opening for religiously committed students and faculty members

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By D. MICHAEL LINDSAY

In 1993, Michael Weiskopf wrote an article for The Washington Post in which he described evangelicals in the United States as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Although the comment provoked outrage from evangelicals, Weiskopf's assertion was not without merit. At the time, only 15 percent of evangelicals held college or graduate degrees. Even though religious conservatives dominated higher education at the turn of the 20th century, by 1993 they had lost their influence within the academy.

Yet on campuses across the country, evangelicalism is rebounding. Evangelical students make up larger and larger portions of the incoming classes at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. They join robust campus-ministry groups that sponsor everything from debates to spring-break "mission" trips. And while they still fall slightly below the national average, the percentage of evangelicals receiving bachelor's degrees has climbed 133 percent from 1976 to 2004, according to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Corporation, more than doubling the change within the general population.

Nowhere has this phenomenon been more evident than on America's top campuses. In 2003, Peter Gomes, the Pusey Minister at Harvard's Memorial Church, said, "There are probably more evangelicals [on Harvard[']s campus today] than at any time since the 17th century."

What is driving this seismic change in American higher education, and what does it mean? To answer those questions, I spent the last five years interviewing 360 evangelicals who are members of the nation's political, business, and cultural elites — perhaps the most comprehensive examination of religion at this level of society ever conducted.

Not surprisingly, one-third of the leaders I interviewed attended highly selective universities. The pluralistic impulse that now guides admissions policy has opened new doors for religiously committed students at such elite institutions. Colleges and universities with national outreach now recruit in the South and Midwest as vigorously as they do on the East and West Coasts. Ethnic diversity also matters. Whereas Asian-Americans account for only 4 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 15 percent of the student enrollment at Ivy League institutions. Many of these students are evangelical. In fact, I found that 90 percent of the members of the Yale chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are Asian-American. In the 1980s, the same chapter was 100 percent white. The changing demography of incoming classes at institutions such as Duke, MIT, and Yale has played a significant role in the evangelical ascendancy.

At the same time, evangelical scholarship has become part of the intellectual mainstream. Harvard Divinity School now has a privately funded chair in evangelical theological studies. In subjects such as history and philosophy, evangelical scholars have become central figures within their fields. Alvin Plantinga, a graduate and onetime faculty member of evangelical Calvin College, has served as president of the central division of the American Philosophical Association. The historian George M. Marsden won the Bancroft Prize in 2004 for his critically acclaimed biography of Jonathan Edwards. Evangelical scholars have become particularly noticeable in disciplines that address religious questions, but respected scholars in other fields have been coming forward in recent years to talk about their evangelical faith. The most conspicuous example is Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who wrote the best-selling The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006).

The "opening of the evangelical mind," as Alan Wolfe has aptly called it, may be surprising to some, but it is not unprecedented. Indeed anti-intellectualism within Christianity is actually an anomaly of the 20th century. For most of Christianity's history, faith and learning have been intertwined. Over the centuries, intellectuals received religious sanction for their scholarly pursuits, and the church — in both Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions — supported a range of intellectual activity, from the scientific research of Newton to the literary contributions of Chesterton. History is on the side of evangelical intellectual strivings.

What do those developments mean for American higher education? For a start, America's universities — notably including elite institutions — are looking more like America. Evangelicals are still underrepresented on major university campuses compared with their size in the U.S. population, but the tide is turning.

That is energizing intellectual life. Evangelicals have reinvigorated theistic approaches to philosophy and paid attention to subjects in political science and sociology that were, for too long, overlooked by others. Those include such subjects as the religious roots of American social movements and the role of Christian missionaries in the spread of global capitalism. Although some fields are more amenable to evangelicals than others, a range of disciplines now engage religious questions. In a column for The Chronicle, Stanley Fish wrote, "When Jacques Derrida died, I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion." In the same article, Fish contended that religion must not be simply studied at arm's length, but must be considered as a viable "candidate for the truth."

Not everyone agrees. The historian David A. Hollinger has argued that universities do not need more Christianity, because religion no longer offers a distinctive mode of proof or way of thinking. Yet in most disciplines, we recognize that scholars bring to their research interpretive frames of reference. Just as one's race and gender can illumine a scholar's work, so too can one's religious commitments. In some quarters, religious conviction grounds a sense of personal vocation for scholars, and, at the least, religion has become a vitally important area of scholarly inquiry.

Forty years ago, conventional sociological wisdom said that society would secularize as it modernized. Such predictions were dead wrong. Levels of education and development have risen sharply around the world, while at the same time religion's influence has grown. It's time for the academy to come to grips with this dynamic. Moral and religious issues will become even more prominent in all disciplines. Greater religious pluralism, in the United States and around the world, will continue to generate new sources of conflict while also suggesting possibilities for cooperation.

Unlike fundamentalists who retreat from pluralistic environments, evangelicals relish the chance to engage people who hold different beliefs. This could present an opportunity for deeper understanding on our campuses, but it will happen only if we bring evangelicals into our classroom discussions. Just as the debate surrounding intelligent design has forced many biologists to engage religious topics in the classroom, so will rising religious pluralism. As we make greater progress in medicine and genomics, we should expect the number of moral issues surrounding those developments to multiply. That, joined with the rising number of evangelical students on our campuses, will demand of us at least a basic understanding of what this religious community believes.

Evangelicals are the most discussed but least understood group in American society. Observers often assume that they are in lockstep with the Republican Party, but the sociologist Christian Smith has shown that 70 percent of evangelicals do not identify with the religious right. Other observers conclude that evangelicals principally serve their own interests, but Allen D. Hertzke's persuasive Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) shows that evangelicals work as vigorously to protect the religious freedom of Buddhists and Jews around the world as they do that of their fellow Christians. A number of journalists and pundits have written about evangelicals since 2000, but the most interesting and helpful works have been academic studies based on empirical research. (Pick up one of those instead of a best-selling polemic to learn more about the subject. Hint: Avoid any work that includes "theocracy" in the title.)

Will evangelicals radically reshape America's institutions of higher learning? Probably not, but it will not be for lack of effort. Evangelicals are devoting enormous resources to making colleges and universities more amenable to their convictions. They are supporting scholarship programs, university research centers, and student groups. Yet the evangelical ascendancy of the last three decades demonstrates how tough it is to change major institutions. George Bennett, who served as treasurer of the Harvard Corporation from 1965 to 1973, became the highest-ranking evangelical at Harvard over the last half-century. What was the net effect of his evangelical influence? In his own words: "Not much. At Harvard, being what it is now … religion takes a back seat." At the end of his term on the Harvard Corporation, the institution was not much different, in terms of openness to evangelicals or their ideals, than it had been when he started. If anyone was in a position to enact cultural change for evangelicals at Harvard, it was George Bennett. The fact that he didn't shows the strength of institutional inertia.

Many colleagues ask me whether evangelicals have enough power to "take over" the country. I often tell them that the evangelical movement is not even united enough to agree on what that would mean. Yet the question belies a concern felt by many about evangelicals, a group that has been bombastic in politics. Will they bring their placards and protests with them as they join the academic establishment, or will they soften their edges?

Are the concerns that animate evangelicals in politics the same concerns of evangelicals in the academy? In some ways, yes, but there are important differences to keep in mind. Evangelical populism — which has served the movement well in American politics — is disdained by many evangelicals in the academy, and for good reason. Populism and intolerance may not be twinborn, but they are related. Also the political conservatism of American evangelicalism is far less common among evangelical academics. On foreign policy, the environment, and care for the poor, evangelical scholars share many of the concerns of their secular colleagues.

Nearly every evangelical scholar I encountered embodies a "cosmopolitan" evangelical faith. They are "worldly" believers, in the best sense of the term. They regularly rub shoulders with people of different faiths and of no faith at all. They aim not to "take back" the country for their faith, but simply want their faith to be seen as reasonable, genuine, and attractive. This cosmopolitan style of faith has helped evangelicals gain a seat at the table within the arts world. Evangelicals who have succeeded, such as the visual artist Makoto Fujimura — the youngest person ever named to the National Council on the Arts — don't desire to impose their moral vision on the rest of the artistic community, but at the same time, they don't want to exclude their faith from the work they do. The same can be said of evangelicals within the groves of academe. Their rise into the halls of power is significant, but not menacing. Cosmopolitan evangelicals will not overturn the apple cart. They want civil discourse, not a culture war.

And we can learn from them. Indeed, in our understanding of evangelicals and the evangelical movement, we could all benefit from a more cosmopolitan outlook.

D. Michael Lindsay is an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007).