The Soul of the American University Revisited From Protestant to Postsecular

The Soul of the American University is a classic and much discussed account of the changing roles of Christianity in shaping American higher education, presented here in a newly revised edition to offer insights for a modern era. As late as the World War II era, it was not unusual even for state schools to offer chapel services or for leading universities to refer to themselves as “Christian” institutions. From the 1630s through the 1950s, when Protestantism provided an informal religious establishment, colleges were expected to offer religious and moral guidance. Following reactions in the 1960s against the WASP establishment and concerns for diversity, this specifically religious heritage quickly disappeared and various secular viewpoints predominated. In this updated edition of a landmark volume, George Marsden explores the history of the changing roles of Protestantism in relation to other cultural and intellectual factors shaping American higher education.

Far from a lament for a lost golden age, Marsden offers a penetrating analysis of the changing ways in which Protestantism intersected with collegiate life, intellectual inquiry, and broader cultural developments. He tells the stories of many of the nation's pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories. By the late nineteenth-century when modern universities emerged, debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible were reshaping conceptions of Protestantism; in the twentieth century important concerns regarding diversity and inclusion were leading toward ever-broader conceptions of Christianity; then followed attacks on the traditional WASP establishment which brought dramatic disestablishment of earlier religious privilege. By the late twentieth century, exclusive secular viewpoints had become the gold standard in higher education, while our current era is arguably “post-secular”. The Soul of the American University Revisited deftly examines American higher education as it exists in the twenty-first century.

George M. Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor Emeritus of History at The University of Notre Dame and a Distinguished Scholar in the History of Christianity at Calvin Theological Seminary. He has published major works on a variety of topics concerning American religion and culture, and his awards include The Bancroft Prize in History and the Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Introduction
Prologue (I): God and Buckley at Yale (1951)
Prologue (II): Henry Sloane Coffin's Yale (1897)
Prologue (III): Yale Embattled: Noah Porter vs. William Graham Sumner (1880)

Part I The Establishment of Protestant Nonsectarianism

1. The Burden of Christendom: Seventeenth-Century Harvard
2. The New Queen of the Sciences and the New Republic
3. Two Kinds of Sectarianism
4. A Righteous Consensus, Whig Style
5. The John the Baptist of the University Ideal

Part II Defining the University in a Scientific Age

6. The Christian Legacy in the Age of Science
7. Back to Noah Porter's Yale
8. Daniel Coit Gilman and the Model for a Modern University
9. Liberal Protestantism at Michigan
10. Harvard and the Religion of Humanity
11. Orthodoxy at the Gentlemen's Club
12. The Low-Church Idea of a University

Part III When the Tie No Longer Binds

13. The Trouble with the Old-Time Religion
14. The Elusive Ideal of Academic Freedom
15. The Fundamentalist Menace
16. The Obstacles to a Christian Presence
17. Outsiders
18. Searching for a Soul
19. A Church with the Soul of a Nation
20. Liberal Protestantism without Protestantism
21. The Twenty-First Century Post-Secular University

Epilogue: An Unexpected Sequel: A Renaissance in Christian Academia