In a fascinating conversation published in Advance magazine a few years ago, Shirley Hoogstra interviewed Anne Snyder and David Brooks about their impressions of the kind of Christian education happening on our CCCU campuses. Are we doing enough, Shirley asked, to be a “leaven” in the larger academy, helping “to transform things for the better?” Not really, Brooks responded. He reported that he often detected a “siege mentality” on evangelical campuses. This shows itself in “a combination of a spiritual superiority complex combined with an intellectual inferiority complex, “creating a sense of, ‘We can’t really go out into the world and say what we’ve got because they’ll hate us.’”
The antidote, Brooks observed, is to trust the fact that “you have what the rest of the world wants. The whole country is filled with spiritual hunger, with no vocabulary to articulate it, and Christian colleges have the vocabulary.” That idea of helping folks find a vocabulary for expressing what they hunger for is a topic that deserves our attention. Indeed, giving it more attention may be crucial for correcting our “siege mentality.”
I first started thinking seriously about the issues here in the mid-1980s when I read Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, the much-discussed work co-authored by Robert Bellah with four social scientist colleagues. The Bellah team observed that the ways in which the people they interviewed described their lives provided clear evidence that the older language of commitment and self-sacrifice was diminishing, being replaced by two other languages. One is the language of “cost-benefit analysis,” where a person decides what to do on the basis of what will bring them the most personal pleasure or profit. The other is the language of “self actualization,” where people talk about becoming more authentic, emphasizing the need for a continuing “personal growth.
My own first take on the book was that it was portraying individualism as a coherent—but obviously flawed–understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life, functioning as a widespread worldview that many people subscribe to in present-day American culture. But I soon came to see that this was not quite the message of the book. The Bellah team, and this was confirmed for me in conversations with Bellah—who, incidentally, was a devout Christian, active in his Episcopal parish in Berkeley—saw individualism not so much as a system of thought but rather as a vocabulary that people choose to employ in talking about how they guide their lives.
This was apparent to me in the team’s detailed report on one of their case studies, where they interviewed at length Brian Palmer, a successful businessman who was in his second marriage—the first having ended in a divorce.[1] Brian expressed much regret about the way he had treated his first wife. He had been so committed to advancing his career, he said, that he had neglected his relationship with her. In his new marriage, however, things were very different. In this relationship, he was concentrating on his own growth as a well-rounded human being. He talked about how much he enjoyed being with his wife, and about how he was now feeling more fulfilled as a human person in this marriage.
Brian had difficulty finding the proper language for the change that had occurred, however. While he was clearly now employing “expressive” concepts, his actual talk still made use of utilitarian vocabulary. Brian’s case, the interviewers observed, offers an example of how individuals in our culture “frequently live out a fuller sense of purpose in life than they can justify in rational terms.”
In interviewing Brian, they challenged him on how he described his marriage. He had said he enjoyed being with her and felt personally fulfilled by their relationship. But what, they asked, if she was in a car accident and became a quadriplegic? Would he continue to be committed to her? Brian clearly had a difficult time expressing himself at this point. It was obvious that he wanted to say that he would stay committed to his wife under those difficult conditions, but he lacked the language to express that commitment. Talking in terms of a personal “cost-benefit analysis” did not allow him to express his commitment. Neither was it helpful simply to talk about “personal growth.”
What the sociologists were getting at is that commitment to a relationship with another person often requires us to stay faithful even when there are no individual benefits, or chances to have “fun” with that person. Real commitment often requires categories that go beyond self-interest, beyond the meeting of personal needs. Brian somehow knew this in his deep places, but he lacked the language to express himself.
The underlying issues here came up for me again when I read Mark Schwehn ‘s impressive 1992 book, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation. Schwehn made his case for faith-based campuses by issuing a lament about what has been happening in the larger academy. In the past, he observed, our intellectual communities were undergirded by such “spiritual” virtues as humility, faith, self-denial, and love. These shared virtues were undergirded by affections, liturgical practices, and symbol systems that are intimately intertwined with religious convictions; but now, he says, “their continued vitality would seem to be in some jeopardy under wholly secular auspices.” This means, Schwehn charges, that much of university life today is drawing on a fund of “borrowed moral capital.”[2]
Schwehn had it right. The virtues he singled out are indeed essential for sustaining an academic community. Humility translates in very concrete ways into a spirit of critical self-examination that is necessary for a healthy intellectual quest. Faith builds the trust and reliance on others that is foundational to scholarly collegiality. Love of one’s subject matter reinforces productive patterns of research, teaching, and dialogue. And honesty is an absolute necessity, both in reporting what we have discovered in our studies and in treating the work of other scholars.
Schwehn also rightly pointed out that in the past these spiritual virtues were themselves grounded in practices of communal worship in the academic setting. While we obviously can’t expect that such practices can be reintroduced into the present-day academy on a wide scale, Schwehn proposed that those of us who carry out our academic vocations on campuses where worship and devotional practices are encouraged should do so in the confidence that we are doing something crucial for contributing to the health of academic life.
There is a way of understanding that advice, though, that fits well with the siege outlook. Since the rest of the academy has lost its moorings, why don’t we just continue to do our thing, withdrawing into strong, faith-based educational communities where we maintain the necessary spiritual patterns. And while we obviously need to let our own constituents know about our virtues, it is best not to say much about it to the secular academy. After all, as Brooks puts it, since they hate us anyway, why irritate them further by telling them that we are doing necessary things that they have long since abandoned?
But Schwehn did not want us to leave it there. He also encouraged us to bear witness to the larger academy and to the connections we see between academic tasks, spiritual virtues, and communal worship. And I’m convinced that in our attempts to do this witness-bearing, we do well to take some clues from David Brooks. Is it possible that we, and many of our secular academic colleagues, actually hunger for similar “spiritual” things but lack an adequate vocabulary for making their case?
My own sense is that whatever “us-versus-them” we experience in the academy these days is not nearly as pronounced as the much-discussed polarization in today’s political arena. And many of our Christian scholars have found friendly conversation partners in unbelievers who are willing to talk with us about our shared concerns regarding the siege mentalities of both the right and the left varieties that afflict our political lives. Similar discussions about academic integrity could also help us to refrain from bearing false witness against academic colleagues who do not share our faith commitments. AS G.K. Chesterton reminded us, while it is sinful to worship false gods, it is also wrong to invent false demons.
In the mid-1970s I spent a year in the Princeton University Sociology Department as a member of a group of NEH Fellows who were doing projects on integrating the humanities and the social sciences. Our mentor was a wonderful “secular” Jewish sociologist, Melvin Tumin, who always began his memos to us with “Dear fellow humanists.” I came to see Mel as a marvelous lover of humanity who did all he could to incorporate traditional values and virtues in his teaching and research. At the same time, many evangelicals –Tim LaHaye for one—were launching crusades in those years against the “humanism’ of “the godless universities.” I had stimulating conversations with Mel Tumin about the fact that he and I shared a “humanist” perspective on the academic vocation. Obviously we can’t expect scholars like him to begin opening their classes in prayer, but we believers do well to make the effort to explore finding a shared vocabulary for correcting some of the evils that increasingly make academic life more difficult these days. The Bellah team was not trying to impose a philosophy of marriage, gender, and vocation on Brian—but they did want to help him to articulate more clearly what he deeply valued in his relationship with his wife.
David Brooks’s many years of journalistic engagement with American culture point the way for us in this. He did not directly preach the Gospel in his New York Times columns. He wanted his readers, whether people of faith or not, to reflect on the kind of leadership that they deeply desire in the public arena, to be explicit about the kind of upbringing they want for their children and grandchildren, and to consider what the likes of Aristotle and Augustine can still teach us about virtuous living. Not a bad agenda for broad-ranging friendly conversations in today’s academy!
[1] Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985), 5-8.
[2] Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (Oxford University Press, 1993).
