[The following was a a presentation for the Department of Religion at the University of Florida in the fall of 2006.]

Religion and the Public University

C. John Sommerville

Editor’s Note: On October 19-20, 2006, the Department of Religion at the University of Florida celebrated it’s 60th anniversary, the second oldest such program at a state university in the US. Two public lectures were offered for this event. The first was a talk re-telling the history and development of the department, given by Chair David Hackett. The second was given by John Sommerville, Emeritus Professor of History at UF, and a friend of the Department. Dr. Sommerville was asked to address the issues of his recent book, The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford UP, 2006), with a view toward what a religious studies program could offer within a state university like UF. As a Center, we are pleased to have Dr. Sommerville on our board, and we think his talk gets to the heart of his book extremely well. While we encourage you to read the whole book, we offer the print version of his lecture as a primer.

You are all acquainted with the phenomenon of the scapegoat, from your studies. The lot has fallen on me to fill that role today, as we discuss the place of religion in the university currently. Or perhaps our hopes for the future of religion in universities. If there is a future for universities. So if I, as a bit of an ignorant outsider, abuse your hospitality by challenging something you hold dear, you can lay your comments on my head.

But I do want to set your minds at ease, somewhat, as we get started. You may know that a book has appeared recently under my name, called The Decline of the Secular University. Of course it is about the university and religion. It is partly a lament about how religion is being ignored in this secularist environment. More importantly, it is a lament about what the university has done to itself by the agenda of the last several generations. David’s talk has reminded us of just how rapidly religion has been contained within the Department of Religion here at the University of Florida. Of course, he has also shown how the department has taken advantage of the new opportunities offered to it.

And yet religions are thriving in America today, at least by some measures. Universities are not thriving, it seems to me. They are not giving leadership, in politics, culture, science, or social responsibility. They do not even succeed on our ultimate measure, of being entertaining, unless you happen to have a championship team in something or other. When they do, they are rewarded.

In the book I raise the question of whether religions might be thriving intellectually more than they are, if religious perspectives were welcomed across the university curriculum. I assume that we in this room do think that religions, or most religions, do have intellectual depth. Also, universities might be closer to the center of American life, if they related to the ultimate concerns of Americans, rather than handling those concerns with special objectivist gloves. Objectivity insists on separating knowledge from action, in line with the fact/value dichotomy which is now under philosophical attack.

So my question for us is where religion departments come into this picture. How are they, or how could they, be improving the religious institutions of our society? And how could they enhance the university’s importance? I suggest three questions for the time we have: (1) Do Religion Departments offer leadership within those religions, or could they? (2) What are their opportunities for leadership of their universities? And (3), wouldn’t they need to become theological in order to be of such help to the university and society? That is, how could they aid either religious bodies or the university except by pressing particular views on them? You may think of other things to discuss, and are free to do that.

By doing theology in the university I mean actually developing the potentialities of a religion. Let me repeat that: by doing theology in the university I mean actually developing the potentialities of a religion. It would be like making religion a professional program, like most of the university has become. Not professional as in certifying specialists for certain careers, but professional in terms of being an applied field. And couldn’t all of our professional education programs be seen to have religious dimensions?

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that I do not lament the fact that professional education is now the choice of most of our students, and the recipient of most of our resources. This seems to me a natural development. For a long time, the job of the university was to discover the facts, and so science was the queen of the sciences. Now, it seems that we have come to a point when we want to apply the knowledge we have. Which means applying it for human benefit. All professional education implies some human good that it offers to serve, although this may be a secret to those teaching it and their deans. I only lament that this professional education is not being informed by conscious consideration of the human. And I suspect that the reason for that is that real consideration of the human gets us into traditional religious discourse. It is commonly held that religions are off limits in tax-supported education, and that we have a safe place to keep them, which is religious studies departments.

We need a new paradigm in thinking about universities. When they were for discovering reality, the burden was on religions to show that they had anything to offer. To the extent that universities are now for applying our knowledge for human benefit, the burden is on science to show that it can make our choices for us. We have been slow to recognize this shift, and of course paradigm shifts are always strenuously resisted. It is what my book is about.

***

Students in secular universities and colleges are not being told the whole truth about their majors. They aren’t told that the central question in medicine is a religious one. Health relates to human wholeness, which is a religious, not a natural, concept. Standards of sanity and disease have to do with optimal human states, which are ideas left over from religion. After all, the AIDS virus is just as much a part of nature as you are, and if naturalism is what you go by then science can make no urgent distinction between diseased and healthy. People in those fields are responding to a religious call whether they are aware of it or not.

Students may not think of the central problems in law and public administration as religious ones — how we should relate to each other. Arts students could be told how much of the world’s great music, art, architecture, poetry, drama and fiction is even now being produced under the inspiration of the transcendent. The field of education is fundamentally a religious enterprise, built on foundations of belief, since there are no self-validating rational principles. Business students probably aren’t told that wealth means well-being, which involves religious perspectives. Money is only a means toward this end, and if we have no idea what well-being is, money will not help us get there. And science students aren’t told that the overriding question about science itself is a religious one, namely what use to make of our knowledge. That’s a question you check at the classroom door.

The upshot of all this is that universities cannot even offer intellectual leadership unless they at least insinuate “ultimate concerns.” You remember that Paul Tillich offered ultimate concern as a noncontroversial, analytic, culture-free definition of the religious. The reason we thought it was so brilliant is that he seemed to have found religion to be a characteristic of “the human” itself. He cunningly showed all of us to be religious, if we only recognized it. Actually, as you probably know, he thought some people worshiped idols like nationalism and “success” and needed to be educated into something truly ultimate. In the final analysis he thought that only the Ultimate could be considered to be ultimate, and that we needed theologians to unpack that for us.

In my book and in this talk, I do not acknowledge the idea of religion-in-general, but only consider specific religions. That is, the noun “religion” is only an analytic term and not a substantive one; it has a formal usefulness but no required content. Religion departments are especially aware of this fact. I only point out that it frees us from some of the demands of objectivity. It gives us license to approach religions subjectively, hermeneutically, and to insist that this is the more profound approach.

But back to the university’s need to take on our biggest concerns. A half century after Tillich we may have reason to doubt the universality of anything like ultimacy. Does everyone have a concern that is ultimate or even close? Are generations of Americans growing up unable to locate anything that can serve as a core of their being? Is their attention so scattered that they cannot make commitments even to family or job? Is it only their tattoo that reminds them they are the same person they were yesterday?

The human, as Tillich and his generation thought of it, actually seems under attack in today’s universities. Science and postmodernism vie in showing how cleverly they can dissolve all certainties, not least our superstition of personal identity. They promise us a future in which we are resolved by a physicalist understanding of consciousness or a shifting of signifiers (or however that goes.)

In my book I urge that religious studies departments should not be the only place in universities where religious viewpoints, ultimate perspectives, can be brought to bear. Our culture has concerns about the human. The ordinary language we use in our discussions of the subject was forged in religious debate. How can we discuss responsibility, justice, sanity, concern, wealth, truth, humane, without involving connotations from a religious past and indeed a religious present?

If such discussions must go on outside the university, doesn’t that make universities marginal? But where do they take place? In politics, where the actual decisions are made with regard to human good? You are shaking your heads. Who in politics has been trained for any such debate? We are wary of electing people with visible religious commitments. In churches? They seem to have been convinced that religion has no intellectual dimension. And who convinced them of this, so much as universities? Are the discussions of the human going on in the media? How could they, when the media must move on to a new concern each day for fear of forfeiting our interest and their profits? In entertainment, which the Greeks understood as a part of public education? Who is in charge of serious discussion these days?

So if the university is to become important in this way it will need a wake-up call. Could religious studies departments be helpful to this end? Or would they violate their mandate in the attempt? This seems to involve the university’s commitment to objectivity. We all recognize the value of objectivity as a tool, applied to appropriate ends. But would that prohibit serious advocacy of the views of religions, in addition to distant and objective consideration? Let me offer a few examples of the possibilities.

First, I claim in my book that the problem of judging religions is becoming more obviously important in the world than it used to seem. Pretending to refuse such judgments seems increasingly insincere these days, and proclaims the university’s marginality. I also argue that religions can only be judged on the basis of other religions, since religions are defined as our terms of ultimate reference. In essence, one’s basis for judgment is one’s religion, if it rises above merely partial objections. Basic scientific, philosophical or utilitarian assumptions don’t bear the weight that religious ones do. They don’t fuse knowledge and motive, wisdom and action the way religions do.

Or second, perhaps we see our job as modeling worthy roles – character-formation, as it were. If we understand character-formation according to the current theory, as learning to inhabit certain narratives more than analyzing certain situations, what narratives are we pressing on our students? Does the whole idea make us nervous? Is that something we need to conquer?

On a third track, are we glad to show students where their own religious traditions offer them a basis for judgment on the politics and culture that surrounds them? Or do we engage in that easier game of scoring off the more rustic elements in society, all in a good cause?

Fourthly, how can a religious studies department get across to students that religions are not just things to think about, but also ways of thinking? For instance, could students imagine, as historians of science have pointed out, that Western science itself is a part of Western religion, beginning in a monotheistic metaphysic and long sustained by a desire to understand the Creator’s other reality? Has the grand narrative of science ever found another basis than that deuteronomic development?

***

A sixtieth anniversary might be a good place to consider how the department sees its opportunities. Actually, I should be pressing this on the university administration or the regents or legislators. We are not our own masters. Academic freedom is for those who own an academy. There are certain things public figures aren’t free to talk about at all, and in America religion is at the top of our list. But religion departments probably have some license to take up subjects that others would shy from.

I really have no idea how to get universities to consider all practical concerns as involving an ultimate reference. So I wrote a book about it. Silly me; who reads books? What sense could Oprah or Larry King make of it? There might have been a day when books with the imprimatur of Oxford University Press might have gotten the attention of important people, but who are the important people today? In 1912 the US elected a college president to be the country’s President. That seems like a very long time ago.

So those are my questions. If there are others that seem more pertinent or interesting, feel free to ignore mine. But to remind you of the three I mentioned earlier:

(1) Could a religion department be of help to religious communities?

(2) If the alternative to the university’s marginalization is a clear sense of purpose, what department within the university should be more clearly identified with questions of purpose than a religion department?

(3) Would it be possible to shake off the negative connotations of “theology” to reassert the practical character of religious education? Or are we most comfortable presenting religion as essentially private? Could a reengagement with theology exist alongside objectivist and hermeneutical approaches, or could it only clash? And could the apparent constitutional difficulties be finessed? In short, could universities still be secular in the sense that religion must not rule, but not secularist, in the sense that religious conclusions must be ruled out.

***

So I’ve said my piece. But if you’ll permit me, I want to share two of my memories of your department which might be relevant here.

When I arrived at UF in 1971 the very first PhD committee I served on in the History Department was on the subject of Billy Graham and the Fundamentalist/Evangelical split, which he played a part in. The outside member on the committee was your own Delton Scudder, who had an enormous problem with the idea that anyone would get a PhD from UF by studying Billy Graham.

Before the candidate came into the examination room Scudder was making an issue of this. Mike Gannon, especially, was trying to calm him down, explaining that in the brave new world of the 70s, anything goes. Well, Scudder knew better, but he let it go. The History Department could go to the Devil for all he cared.

I went along with the department here, but I’ve come to feel that maybe Scudder was right. Maybe not about Graham, but about the idea that academics should offer judgments and defend them. And right in his implication that theology belongs in the university, or theological arguments do.

The other memory I have is of reading some of Dick Hiers’ books on New Testament thought, and being greatly enlightened by them. But I thought it was very curious that the Library of Congress classification system had them all shelved in the BS section. Makes you wonder about Congress’s sympathies. And made me realize what the Religion Department is up against.

_______

C. John Sommerville is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Florida, and he serves on the board of the Christian Study Center. Throughout his career, Dr. Sommerville’s work has traversed the secularization of various cultural touchpoints in England and the United States.