University of Notre Dame
Church Life Journal
A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life
Anyone working in a university today knows the mood: dashboards, key performance indicators, rubrics, and assessment grids—the sense that what gets measured has quietly replaced what matters. A stream of recent books has given this malaise a public voice. Jerry Z. Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics warns how measurement regimes distort institutional mission. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor pleads for humane scholarship in a culture of speed. Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors chronicles the corporate university’s erosion of the vocation to teach. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift demonstrates that many students learn little that can be quantified at all. Together these works describe modern institutions of higher education as anxious, managerial, and spiritually thin.
Sociologist Max Weber would not be surprised. He called this Entzauberung, “disenchantment”—the draining of shared ends from public life and their replacement by procedural reason.[1] Bureaucracy, in his analysis, is what rushes in when the question of the good has been forgotten. We feel the iron cage closing because our institutions increasingly speak the language of administration rather than purpose.
But here is the crucial question: why was there a vacuum for audit culture to fill? The answer, I want to suggest, is theological. Long before the spreadsheets and strategic plans, the modern university had already shifted its animating principle—from revelation to culture, from transcendence to immanence, from God to the self. Once theology was displaced (not removed but relocated), a space opened where metrics could masquerade as meaning. If we want a clearer diagnosis of the present, we must look upstream—to the nineteenth-century transformation of theology that made today’s bureaucratic university not only possible but almost inevitable.
Most assume that secularism means the absence of religion. We speak of “secular universities” as if they are simply neutral spaces, emptied of theological content. This assumption runs deep. It shapes how we talk about academic freedom, how we defend research universities, how we present ourselves to the public. But I want to suggest something different. The secularization of the modern university is not a story of religion being removed. It is a story of theology being transformed. And here is the real surprise: this transformation was itself a theological project, not an anti-theological one.
The secular university is not areligious. It is theologically confused. It inherited a Protestant metaphysics while forgetting its source. And if secularism has theological roots, then the “conflict” between science and religion that figures like Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper narrated—a conflict that has become almost canonical in how we understand modernity—is itself a theological narrative, not a neutral historical account. What I want to emphasize is not how to defend the secular university, but how to make its hidden theology visible. And then to ask: is there a better way forward?
Three events (or figures) crystallized this theological transformation, revealing the movement from transcendence to immanence that would reshape the university.
First: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel described the movement of world history as the gradual reconceiving of the “external Sun”—the transcendent God—as an “inner Sun”—the self-creation of human spirit.[2] Contemplation of the divine becomes divinized human activity. History becomes a process of emancipation in which humanity, becoming self-conscious, achieves freedom. This is, fundamentally, a theological vision. It is not anti-religious. It is a reconfiguration of where divinity resides.
Hegel always professed to be a Lutheran, and there is no reason to doubt him. He was a student of theology before philosophy. As Frederick Copleston observed, Hegel “came to philosophy from theology.”[3] Yet as J.M.E. McTaggart recognized long ago, Hegel was “an enemy in disguise—the least evident but the most dangerous.”[4] It was something Hegel did not intend. He took Christianity seriously. But in his attempt to restore humanity to a state of harmony, he seemed to call for the divinization of humanity, transferring worship of the “external Sun” to the “inner Sun.”
Hegel saw the Protestant Reformation as the single key event of history since Roman times. The Church, according to Hegel, had insisted on blind obedience. But with the Reformation, every human was called to recognize the truth of his or her own spiritual nature, to be responsible for their own salvation. Thus no outside authority was needed to interpret the Scriptures or perform rituals. For Hegel, the ecclesiastical institution had become a source of oppression. But despite this critique, Hegel believed he served a positive purpose. He sought not to destroy but to construct—or reconstruct. His quest was intrinsically religious. The whole task of philosophy, he insisted, is to show how “the natural and spiritual universes return to their truth in the religious standpoint.”[5]
This theology lent itself to many competing interpretations. The “Right Hegelians” attempted to reconcile his religious views with Protestant Christianity. The more radical “Left Hegelians” saw his attempt to reconcile Christianity with philosophy as a failure. Taking Hegel’s concept of the “unhappy consciousness,” they argued that religion is a form of alienation. Man creates God, and then imagines that God has created him. German philosopher Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, who studied under Hegel, argued in his Essence of Christianity that all theology is really a projection. “God is the mirror of man,” he wrote.[6] He sought to turn theologians into anthropologists, to “turn the lovers of God into lovers of men,” as Karl Barth aptly summarized.[7] Feuerbach declared that human beings have created the gods, who embody their own idealized conception of their aspirations, needs, and fears. Consciousness of God is human self-consciousness; knowledge of God is human self-knowledge. “If man is to find contentment in God,” Feuerbach proclaimed, “he must find himself in God.”[8]
Second: Andrew Dickson White, the founding president of Cornell University. When White established Cornell as nonsectarian in 1868, he was immediately attacked as “godless” and “infidel.” His response was revealing. He insisted—and this must be emphasized—that Cornell was not secular. It was Christian. It promoted “Christian civilization.” It began each day with prayer. Its chapel stood at the center of campus. But what made it “Christian” was not doctrine or confession. It was what White called a “religion pure and undefiled”—a religion of moral sentiment, of the cultivated conscience, of human progress guided by divine immanence.[9]
White had absorbed the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the romanticism of his German education. He had secularized Christianity by relocating revelation from Scripture to the human heart, from dogma to feeling, from transcendence to immanence. When his contemporaries attacked Cornell as “godless,” White doubled down on insisting it was Christian. But his Christianity had undergone profound transformation. It was no longer rooted in incarnation, resurrection, atonement—the historic dogmas of the church. It was rooted in what he called “a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.”[10] This formulation—borrowed from Victorian poet and social critic Matthew Arnold—evacuates Christianity of its particular theological content while preserving its emotional and moral force. God becomes the name for moral progress itself.
White was not being dishonest. He had read Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Schleiermacher. He had absorbed their conviction that Christianity must evolve, that dogma was the problem, that true religion was deeper than doctrine. White genuinely believed that by stripping away theology, he was preserving authentic Christian faith.
Third: The entire liberal Protestant tradition that mediated this transformation. Figures like William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher were not secularists in the modern sense. They were deeply religious thinkers trying to save Christianity for the modern age. But in doing so, they performed a remarkable theological move: they separated “religion” from “theology,” identifying true religion with moral sentiment, evolutionary progress, and the indwelling spirit of God in nature and humanity. They were not attacking religion. They were reconstructing it on new foundations.
German mediating theology—what scholars call Vermittlungstheologie—sought to reconcile Enlightenment rationalism with romantic faith. Theologians like Schleiermacher argued that true religion was not doctrine but feeling, not external authority but internal conviction. Religion could evolve. Dogma was the problem; spiritual experience was the solution. This was not anti-Christian. It was a reconstruction of Christianity on new foundations.
These ideas migrated to America through figures like Philip Schaff, the Swiss-German church historian who arrived in 1844. Schaff preached a Hegelian dialectic of church history—that religious truth unfolds progressively through historical conflict. His influence on American university leadership was profound. The basic move was always the same: separate “religion” from “theology,” identify true religion with moral sentiment or spiritual feeling, and declare that Christianity could progress through modern science and criticism.[11]
What happened to the actual curriculum reveals that this was not the triumph of secularity but a theological war. In the early American college—even at Harvard and Yale—moral philosophy and natural theology were central. These were not peripheral. They were where the entire curriculum converged. Every student studied them. They asked: what is God? What is human nature? How should we live? These questions were not seen as separate from science; they were integrated with it.
By mid-century, this was changing. By the end of the century, it had collapsed. Between 1870 and 1890—a twenty-year period—most American universities eliminated required courses in moral philosophy and natural theology. They were replaced by electives in ethics, history of religion, comparative religion. Specific theological content was replaced by more abstract, comparative, “objective” study. The sacred was being replaced by the scientific. Or rather, the sacred was being redefined as the scientific.
And this was not accidental—it was deliberate theological strategy. When Charles Eliot reformed Harvard Divinity School in the 1890s, he did not eliminate theology. Ministry, he declared, no longer needed “theological precision” but rather “candor, knowledge, wisdom, and love.”[12] That is a theological move disguised as a secular one. He was saying: abandon confessional theology, adopt the theology of the cultivated self. Forget the Nicene Creed; embrace the religion of conscience and progress.
Eliot made this explicit in his 1909 book The Religion of the Future. The coming faith, he predicted, would reject traditional doctrines—the Fall, atonement, incarnation—and embrace instead what he called the “Infinite Spirit” immanent in all things. Divinity would be found not in Jesus Christ but in moral progress itself. God would become what he called an “exhaustless Energy,” continuous with nature and human reason.[13]
This was a theological conflict, not a religious-versus-secular one. What looked like universities becoming secular was actually liberal Protestantism winning a theological battle against conservative Protestantism. The conflict was between two versions of Christianity, not between Christianity and science.
At the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper made this explicit. As founding president, he aimed to create an instrument of the “Kingdom of God”—but his kingdom was the kingdom of human reason perfected through scientific study, not the kingdom inaugurated by Christ. His biblical scholarship did not attack the Bible; it reconstructed what the Bible meant through historical criticism. The effect was the same: Christian particularism gave way to universal progressive principles.[14]
Even more dramatically, David Starr Jordan at Stanford—raised by Unitarian parents who admired Theodore Parker—spoke openly of creating a religion that would have “no creed, no ceremonies necessary to its practice, no sacred legends or mysteries.” This was to be the “religion of a sensible American”—rational, individualistic, divorced from institution and tradition.[15]
The curriculum changes reflected all of this. As these theological liberals gained control of universities, they did not add secular subjects; they redefined religious subjects. Moral theology became ethics. Sacred history became comparative religion. Biblical revelation became literature. The old unity-of-knowledge ideal—that all truth pointed to God—was replaced by compartmentalization: science in one sphere, personal religion in another.
But this compartmentalization was itself a theological move, reflecting the German mediating theology that had taught faith and reason to be separate domains. Julie Reuben’s research demonstrates that universities did not secularize by expelling religion. They secularized by redefining religion as something without intellectual content. The science of religion—which promised to study religious phenomena objectively—actually undermined religious authority. Biblical criticism, sociology of religion, psychology of religion: all these disciplines treated religion as a human phenomenon to be explained, not as truth to be believed. The effect was devastating. By the early twentieth century, as Reuben argues, religious studies in the university had become a way of neutralizing religion, making it safe for the modern academy by draining it of any claims to truth.[16]
The university did not become secular. It became theologically incoherent. It absorbed Christianity’s functions—moral formation, spiritual aspiration, the promise of transcendence—while rejecting Christian content. Religion became culture. Revelation became conscience. Dogma became sentiment. The university became a “secular monastery”—a site of spiritual formation without theology, a priesthood without priests.
This is why the modern secular university is not simply godless. It is theologically confused. It performs theological functions—forming character, promising transcendence, offering meaning—while denying it is doing theology at all. And this creates an instability at its core. The university promises salvation—not from sin, but from ignorance. It offers redemption through knowledge. It functions as a sacred community. But it has no coherent account of why any of this matters or what humans are ultimately for.
This genealogy helps us understand something that has shaped all of our thinking about science, religion, and the university: the so-called “conflict thesis”—the narrative that science and religion are inherently at war.
Most of us have internalized this story. Science and religion are opposed. The rise of modern science required the defeat of religious dogmatism. Universities had to become secular to become free and scientific. This story is so pervasive that even people who reject it often assume everyone else accepts it.
But here is what careful historical research reveals: the “conflict thesis” is not a neutral historical discovery. It is a theological narrative, a weapon in a theological war. It was constructed by people—like White, like Eliot, like the New Theologians—who had a specific theological agenda: to purge Christianity of dogma and reconstruct it on new foundations.
When White narrated the “warfare of science with theology” in his massive two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, he was not describing objective history. He was performing a theological move. He was trying to discredit traditional Christianity—which he saw as ossified, backward, superstitious—to clear the ground for a newer, purer, more evolved form of Christianity rooted in feeling and moral progress.[17]
The theological conflict was never really between science and religion. It was between contending Christian traditions. Conservative Protestant theologians insisted on biblical authority and traditional doctrine. Liberal Protestant theologians insisted on reason, historical criticism, and evolving truth. Both claimed to be Christian. Both claimed to be true. The conflict was about authority, about the basis of Christian belief—not about whether religion and science could coexist.
But White and others redefined that theological conflict as if it were a conflict between religion itself and science. By doing this, they accomplished something brilliant and devastating: they made their particular theological reconstruction look like progress, like modernity, like the inevitable march of enlightenment. And anyone who resisted their version of Christianity—traditional believers who insisted on apostolic succession, miraculous intervention, biblical authority—got labeled as anti-scientific, backwards, obscurantist.
The tragedy is that this narrative succeeded. It became canonical. It shaped how we understand the entire modern period. Even today, when we talk about the “secularization” of culture, we are usually still operating with White’s framework: the warfare model, the inevitability of progress, the equation of traditional Christianity with obscurantism.
What we have obscured is this: what actually happened was not the triumph of secularism over religion, but the triumph of one kind of theology over another. Liberal Protestant theology won. It absorbed the university. It transformed the meaning of religion, knowledge, and human purpose. And then it forgot what it was. By the early twentieth century, what had begun as a theological reconstruction of Christianity had become indistinguishable from outright secularism.
More recent scholarship has begun to catch up. Peter Berger, who spent decades documenting what he called “secularization,” eventually acknowledged that he had been wrong. He recognized that what he had been studying was not the disappearance of religion but its transformation. He called this the “heretical imperative”—the notion that in modern pluralistic societies, religion becomes voluntary, interiorized, individualized. But that is still religious. It is just not traditional religion.[18]
Charles Taylor makes a similar point in A Secular Age. The modern secular age, he argues, is not simply post-religious. It is shaped by very particular theological commitments—to immanence, to human dignity, to progress, to the autonomous individual—that have Christian roots even when they have lost their Christian language. What Taylor calls “Exclusive Humanism” carries within it traces of Christian anthropology and Christian eschatology, even as it explicitly rejects Christian transcendence.[19]
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation pushes this further. He argues that the fragmentation of modern thought—the fact that we have no shared framework for thinking about ultimate questions—is itself an unintended consequence of Protestant theology. The Reformation’s insistence on individual conscience, on the sufficiency of Scripture, on the freedom of inquiry, eventually led to a world where no single framework could command assent. Modernity’s incoherence, Gregory suggests, is Protestantism’s legacy.
By the late twentieth century, the liberal Protestant vision had become so attenuated, so emptied of content, that it collapsed into outright secularism. But notice: what replaced it was not genuine secularity or atheism. It was something else entirely—what we might call a diffuse, bureaucratic, technocratic religiosity masquerading as neutrality.
Sociologist Ulrich Beck and others have noted how modern society retains deeply religious structures—rituals, authorities, sacred narratives—even as it explicitly denies their religious character. We have the priesthood of experts, the revealed truth of data, the salvation narrative of progress through innovation. We have new forms of meaning-making that function theologically even as they present themselves as purely rational and scientific.[20]
And here is the truly revealing part: the contemporary university is deeply hostile to traditional Christianity—to incarnation, resurrection, the specific claims of the Gospel. But it is not hostile to religion as such. It is perfectly happy with Buddhism, indigenous spiritualities, religious pluralism framed as tolerance. Why? Because these can be absorbed into what we might call the contemporary secular consensus without threatening its fundamental assumptions. They are exotic, they are personal, they are culturally interesting. But they do not make absolute truth claims. They do not demand conversion or renunciation of the autonomous self.
The modern “rights talk”—the framing of every issue in terms of individual rights and autonomous choice—is itself a theological framework that emerged from Christian anthropology but has now become utterly divorced from its sources. We do not realize it is religious because we have internalized it so completely. It feels like common sense. But it is common sense only to those of us shaped by this particular theological tradition.
So the situation is this: the modern secular university is not simply anti-religious. It is selectively anti-Christian while remaining deeply religious. It has absorbed the functions of Christianity—formation, meaning-making, moral aspiration—but emptied them of Christian particularity. And the problem is that without grounding those functions in something transcendent, something genuinely other than the autonomous self, they become unstable. They turn into performative gestures, bureaucratic requirements, hollow rituals.
This is why students today are simultaneously more “tolerant” of religion and more alienated from it. They sense the incoherence. They know something is missing. They are hungry for meaning but the university can offer them only techniques for generating meaning within themselves. And that never works. Because as St. Augustine knew, and as John Henry Newman later insisted, the human heart is made for something beyond itself. It cannot rest in itself alone.
If secular modernity has not actually removed theology from the university, but merely hidden it and scrambled its sources, might there be a way to make theology visible again—not as doctrine to be imposed, but as wisdom to be recovered?
This is where John Henry Newman becomes essential. Newman (1801-1890), the great Victorian theologian and educator who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1845, is perhaps best known for his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and for his leadership of the Oxford Movement. But his most enduring contribution to educational thought is The Idea of a University, based on lectures delivered in 1852 as he prepared to establish the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin.[21]
Newman is important precisely because he refused the Hegelian move. He refused to spiritualize humanity at the expense of transcendence. He refused to collapse revelation into conscience. He refused to let the university become a substitute church. But—and this is crucial—Newman also did not simply say “go back to medieval scholasticism” or “restore confessional control of education.” He did something more interesting. He argued that the university must be honest about what it is doing theologically, and he grounded intellectual inquiry not in the autonomous self (which is what liberal Protestants did) but in something deeper than either reason or feeling alone.
Three key insights emerge from Newman’s vision. First: knowledge has an intrinsic order. Not all knowledge is equal. Some knowledge serves human flourishing; some merely serves curiosity or power. The university’s job is not to remain neutral about this. It is to help students understand which forms of knowledge matter and why. Newman writes: “Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. . . . It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.” Yet he immediately adds a crucial qualification: these qualities “are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness. . . . They may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless.”[22]
In other words, education in itself does not automatically produce virtue. Knowledge must be ordered toward proper ends. The university exists not simply to transmit information but to cultivate wisdom—the capacity to discern what knowledge is for and how it should be used. This directly challenges the modern notion that universities should be content-neutral temples of pure inquiry.
Second: formation precedes information. Newman insists that the university is not primarily a place where you acquire knowledge but where you become someone—someone capable of wisdom, discernment, practical judgment. “A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.”[23] You cannot download that. It requires mentorship, example, community, time. It requires living within a community of learners oriented toward transcendent goods.
Newman describes this formation in almost sacramental terms. The university is a place where the student encounters not just ideas but reality itself, mediated through disciplines and ordered toward truth.
The man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze,” Newman writes, “who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman . . . or an economist, or an engineer . . . but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings . . . with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger.[24]
This challenges our obsession with efficiency and outcomes. Formation cannot be rushed. It cannot be measured by credit hours or learning objectives. It requires what the monastic tradition calls stabilitas—stability, rootedness, patient dwelling in a community ordered toward truth.
Third: education is fundamentally a matter of the soul’s orientation. By this Newman does not mean narrowly religious indoctrination. He means what Bernard Lonergan would later call “intellectual conversion”—a reorienting of the self toward truth itself, toward beauty, toward goodness. It means recognizing that human beings are not self-legislating spirits who generate their own meaning. We are creatures oriented toward something beyond ourselves. Education, at its best, awakens us to that orientation.[25]
Newman writes:
I am asked what is the end of University Education, and of the Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge which I conceive it to impart: I answer, that what I have already said has been sufficient to show that it has a very tangible, real, and sufficient end, though the end cannot be divided from that knowledge itself. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.[26]
But Newman immediately qualifies this. Knowledge is its own end, yes—but only when properly ordered. Knowledge pursued for its own sake, without reference to the Good, becomes mere curiosity or, worse, a tool of domination. “You see, then, here are two methods of Education; the end of the one is to be philosophical, of the other to be mechanical; the one rises towards general ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and external.”[27]
Now, Newman himself was explicitly Christian—indeed, explicitly Catholic. His vision is rooted in Catholic theology and the Catholic intellectual tradition. But his principles—about the ordering of knowledge, the necessity of formation, the spiritual dimension of learning—these can be recovered even in pluralistic settings, by scholars who may not share his faith but who share his conviction that human beings are made for something more than self-cultivation and that universities should serve that deeper human purpose.
What might recovery look like in practice? Not restoration of Christendom—that is neither possible nor desirable. But recovery of certain practices and convictions that Newman identified and that the liberal Protestant transformation obscured.
Practice One: grounding knowledge in wisdom. This means asking: “What is this knowledge for? How does it serve human flourishing? What virtues does it require and cultivate?” Not every discipline needs to answer these questions the same way. But the university, as an institution, should cultivate spaces where such questions are asked. This recovers the old “unity of knowledge” ideal—not doctrinal unity, but unity of purpose—without requiring theological agreement.
In practice, this might mean creating seminars or colloquia where faculty from different disciplines gather not to discuss methodology but to discuss meaning. What does it mean to study literature, or biology, or economics? What goods are we serving? What vision of human flourishing animates our work? These conversations need not lead to consensus, but they make visible the fact that every discipline operates with implicit theological commitments.
Practice Two: restoring mentorship as central. Not just instruction, but formation. This means investing in faculty not merely as content-deliverers but as shapers of souls and minds. It means creating communities of learning where students encounter not just ideas but exemplars—people who embody the integration of knowledge and virtue, who show what it looks like to pursue truth in service of goods beyond oneself.
Newman understood that formation happens primarily through encounter. The university is not primarily a delivery system for information but a community of inquiry where students apprentice themselves to masters. This cannot be scaled or efficiently managed. It requires small seminars, tutorial systems, residential colleges—structures that prioritize depth of relationship over breadth of coverage.
Practice Three: making existential inquiry central again. Students are “convertible”—they want their minds and hearts opened to deeper questions. The humanities have largely abandoned this mission, trying instead to become “scientific” about literature and history. But students hunger for spaces where they can ask: What is a life for? How should I live? What matters?
These are not less rigorous questions than any others. They require deep engagement with texts, history, philosophy, theology. But they require a different pedagogy—one that invites students into conversation across centuries, that takes seriously the wisdom of the dead, that does not reduce every text to its historical context or ideological function.
Practice Four: integrating theology back into the conversation—not as required doctrine, but as an indispensable voice. Theology asks questions that philosophy alone cannot answer. It offers a vocabulary for transcendence that secular frameworks struggle to provide. A Catholic scholar, a Protestant scholar, an Orthodox scholar, an atheist philosopher—all benefit from engaging theological wisdom, precisely because theology has thought deeply about human limitation, divine grace, redemption, what we might call the non-negotiable core of the human condition.
This is not about making universities “Christian” again in any confessional sense. It is about making them honest about their theological inheritance and open again to wisdom that comes from beyond the secular academy’s self-imposed boundaries. As James Turner and Jon Roberts have shown, the result of removing God from higher education was that universities could no longer give students a framework of meaning for their studies, nor instill in them virtuous character. The humanities attempted to re-integrate knowledge by building broad contextual frameworks, and thus to impart truth, goodness, and beauty to students. But the project ultimately failed.[28]
George Marsden, in his search for the “soul of the American university,” recognized that educational reformers like John Dewey, Daniel C. Gilman, and William Rainey Harper were far from being opponents of Christian influence in the university. These reformers and others all believed that knowledge could fit into a coherent framework shaped by a Protestant Christian humanism. Nevertheless, their zeal for a “progressive,” “universalist” Christianity stripped the faith of its specificity and power, unwittingly creating the conditions that relegated religion to the periphery of intellectual life. In other words, their avoidance of Christian particularism, or “nonsectarianism,” almost always collapsed into the “secular.”[29]
What we need is not more “nonsectarian” Christianity but honest engagement with particular theological traditions—including Christianity in its various forms, but not exclusively. The point is not to privilege one tradition but to acknowledge that questions about truth, goodness, beauty, and human purpose are inescapably theological, and that pretending otherwise only drives theology underground where it operates invisibly and irresponsibly.
If the modern secular university is not actually secular but theologically confused—if it sacralized humanity while forgetting to ground human dignity in anything beyond itself—then what we face is not a choice between religion and secularity. It is a choice between hidden theology and honest theology.
The path forward is not to abandon the research university or the ideals of critical inquiry. It is to recover the conviction that such inquiry must be situated in something larger—a vision of human flourishing, a sense of what we are for, a community gathered around shared goods that transcend the individual.
This is what Newman gives us. Not a blueprint for a Christian university, but a framework for thinking about what a university is for that takes seriously both intellectual rigor and human formation, both reason and wisdom, both individual freedom and transcendent goods. His vision is comprehensive enough to speak to Catholic, Protestant, and secular institutions alike—not because it papers over differences, but because it identifies the deep structure of what universities must do if they are to educate whole persons rather than simply train technicians.
The question is whether we have the courage to recover it. The contemporary university has become adept at avoiding ultimate questions. We have created elaborate systems for measuring inputs and outputs while remaining studiously agnostic about what any of it is for. We speak the language of “critical thinking” and “global citizenship” without asking what we are thinking about or what goods citizenship should serve. We promise to form students into certain kinds of people while denying that we have any vision of what kind of people they should become.
This evasion is unsustainable. It produces the malaise that Berg, Seeber, Donoghue, Muller, and others document. It creates the vacuum that bureaucracy rushes to fill. And it leaves students hungry for meaning in institutions that have systematically deprived themselves of the resources necessary to provide it.
The alternative is not theocracy or confessionalism. It is not the imposition of doctrine or the violation of academic freedom. It is simply honesty about what we are already doing—making judgments about what knowledge matters, forming students into certain kinds of people, serving certain visions of human flourishing. Once we admit that we are always already doing theology, we can do it better. We can do it consciously, critically, in conversation with the great theological traditions that have thought longest and deepest about these questions.
The modern university was not secularized by removing religion. It was transformed by a particular theological vision—one that relocated the divine from heaven to earth, from God to humanity, from revelation to culture. That vision has now exhausted itself, leaving us with institutions that retain Christianity’s ambitions (formation, transcendence, redemption) without Christianity’s resources. We cannot go back. But we can go forward differently—by recovering the wisdom that Newman and the great Christian educational tradition offer, not as sectarian imposition but as indispensable insight into what education is and what human beings are for.
The iron cage is not inevitable. It is the consequence of theological amnesia. The path to freedom runs not around theology but through it—through honest reckoning with the theological inheritance we have forgotten, through serious engagement with theological wisdom we have marginalized, through recovery of the conviction that education serves not merely the economy or the state but the full flourishing of human persons made for truth, beauty, and goodness. That conviction is not sectarian. It is simply human. And recovering it may be the only way to save the university from itself.
[1] Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.
[2] Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 109.
[3] Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7 (New York: Image Books, Doubleday, 1994), 11.
[4] J. M. E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 250.
[5] Georg W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Brudon Sanderson, 3 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1895), 1.106-09.
[6] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London: John Chapman, 1854), 62.
[7] Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 521.
[8] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 44.
[9] On White’s vision for Cornell, see James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 145-178.
[10] This phrase comes from Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1873). White adopted it as his working definition of religion. See Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White, 2 vols. (New York: Century Co., 1905), 1.367.
[11] Elizabeth A. Clark, Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 54-89.
[12] Cited in Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 143.
[13] Charles W. Eliot, The Religion of the Future (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1909), 18-24.
[14] On Harper’s vision, see George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 244-256.
[15] Cited in Marsden, Soul of the American University, 233.
[16] Reuben, Making of the Modern University, 176-233.
[17] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). On the theological nature of White’s project, see Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, esp. 145-210.
[18] Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1979).
[19] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-593.
[20] Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992).
[21] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Originally published as Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (Dublin, 1852) and expanded in subsequent editions.
[22] Newman, Idea of a University, 101-102.
[23] Newman, Idea of a University, 76.
[24] Newman, Idea of a University, 125-126.
[25] See Bernard Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert M. Doran and Robert C. Croken (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
[26] Newman, Idea of a University, 92.
[27] Newman, Idea of a University, 107.
[28] Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[29] Marsden, Soul of the American University, 265-419.
Featured Image: Photograph of the American delegation to the First International Peace Conference at the Hague, 1899 [Andrew Dickson White, center, with cane]; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.
Posted in Science and Religion
James Ungureanu
James C. Ungureanu is Adjunct Professor at Carthage College, where he teaches in the Intellectual Foundations Program. He is the author of several books on science and religion, most recently, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict.
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