The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Second Edition
When George Marsden published The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship in 1997, I was a couple years away from completing my PhD in English. I was a young Christian studying at a state university in exactly the kind of academic environment hostile to religious faith that Marsden addresses in his book. Having been educated entirely in secular schools and knowing no one within my Christian community who was in academia at that time, I didn’t know about George Marsden, this book, or his previous book, The Soul of the American University, the response to which prompted The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. I wish I had known. I needed the book then. Sadly, we still need it now.
Reading this recently updated edition of I was a strange experience. It was my first time reading the book at all. Encountering it now felt like stretching one foot back in time to the secular academy I experienced in the late 1980s and through the 1990s while simultaneously having the other foot firmly planted in the present: Marsden’s original assessment still rings painfully and prophetically true. I think if I’d read this book ten years ago, the book would have felt less necessary. But, alas, much has happened in the past decade that has reversed what seemed like progress for Christians in academia (and perhaps for almost everyone else, too).
Despite being separated in our respective academic careers by decades and disciplines, it is as though in writing this book Marsden had been present in my doctoral seminars thirty years ago, observing the overt hostility toward and disdain of Christians on the part of the faculty and my fellow students, and my own awkward, ill-prepared attempts to do what Marsden advocates: integrate my faith with my learning.
One memory from those days that has yet to dim occurred in a classroom as my classmates and I waited for that day’s seminar to begin. The text assigned for that class session was A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. This work is a firsthand account of a colonial American woman who, having left England to settle in Massachusetts Bay Colony, was, along with several of her young children, taken captive in 1676 by Native Americans and held for nearly three months. Rowlandson’s memoir, published in 1682, recounts her ordeal in a way that reflects her devout Puritan Christian faith, particularly in assigning God’s sovereignty to her experience. This and other works like it by minor literary figures had yet to be re-discovered in my field, so there were few modern editions of the text available at the time. The edition our professor assigned had been published by a small press that happened to be faith-based; in other words, it was produced by the sort of people for whom the work was not merely a literary text of academic interest but primarily a work of spiritual devotion of importance to church history and a life of faith. The book’s editorial preface thus offered reflections affirming and praising Rowlandson for her perseverance and her doctrinal convictions.
During those few minutes as we awaited the start of class, some of the students started to read portions of the preface aloud, laughing in disdain and disbelief that the editors of the text actually believed what Rowlandson had believed. It would have been, of course, inappropriate to do the same to Rowlandson’s narration, she being the proper object of historical and literary interest. But the same ideas expressed by twentieth century editors? That was something else altogether. I said nothing as they mocked, but during our first class break, I spoke to one of the students in the hall, gently admonishing him for the intolerance of Christians he and the others had displayed. My classmate was surprised at my words but seemed to receive them and humbly apologized before we returned to class.
This is but a small and very specific anecdote, but it is one, I think, that reflects what Marsden has writ large in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. While some of my own experiences might have been (rather unbelievably when I think about it now) scenes stolen from God’s Not Dead (a very bad Christian film playing on the worst tropes about secular academia),1 the deeper and more pervasive problems Marsden addresses were—and are—more nuanced and subtle. These problems were a long time coming, as shown by Marsden’s history of how the liberal Protestant establishment in American academia came over the course of the twentieth century to be overrun by a less classically liberal, more secularist, and overall increasingly intolerant regime. The polarization that resulted by the latter part of the last century presented a seemingly unbridgeable separation between the Christian life and the academic life. This was the very tension in which I was living and learning.
I was an aspiring academic. And I was a Christian—a conservative evangelical one, to boot. Looking back now, it seems it was almost inevitable, trying as I was to bridge this chasm between faith and learning on my own, that I would be hired at a conservative evangelical university immediately upon (indeed, just before) completing my PhD. This part of my academic career reflects the other side of the story Marsden tells in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.
In the book, Marsden mentions in passing the experience of a professor at one Christian institution who “said it took ten years of teaching to unlearn the lessons of his graduate training that he should suppress his faith” (13). It didn’t take me ten years to do the same, but my parallel shift was likewise difficult if more abrupt.
Toward the end of my PhD studies, I encountered Christian worldview thinking and, along with it, the idea of integrating faith and learning which Marsden advocates. But learning about it and doing it are two different things. So it wasn’t until my first semester of full-time teaching at this evangelical university that I understood I needed to completely re-educate myself in order to teach from a Christian worldview. The proverbial lightbulb went on while I was teaching my first sophomore-level survey of British literature. I found myself parroting all I had been taught to think and say about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—and realized I was saying nothing about the rich theology of the work, or the illuminating conflicts Chaucer felt and expressed in his work between an understanding of “art for art’s sake” and “art for God’s sake,” or why on earth a Christian young person taking a required literature course should care at all about any of it. I also realized I had assigned the very raunchy Miller’s Tale and had no idea how to approach teaching such a work in an evangelical classroom. I simply told the students we’d skip that item on the syllabus but didn’t tell them why. That’s when I knew I needed to school myself. So I did.
I read even more on Christian worldview. There was not much to read. As Marsden wrote back in 1997, too few academics were then considering the implications of belief for their academic field (2–3), including my own field of English literature. So I became a proponent of integrating Christian faith with learning, in the classroom and in life. I tried to model it in my own modest scholarship. I taught faculty workshops on it, evaluated peers in the classroom on their ability to do so, and emulated it for my students. I assigned readings on integrating Christian worldview into reading literature and literary criticism. In teaching literary theory, I would encourage my students to consider what light each school could shed and what truth that school might neglect. I would ask them how a Christian worldview might offer a fuller picture.
Then one day a bright student asked me if Christian worldview criticism wasn’t just another school of theory like the rest. Indeed, Marsden assumes this idea when he asks, “Why are there in mainstream academia almost no identifiable Christian schools of thought to compare with various Marxist, feminist, gay, post-modern, African-American, conservative, or liberal schools of thought?” (5). But my student’s question gave me pause. After all, my Christian faith, along with it, my Christian worldview, was not, I believed, different merely in degree from other theoretical schools, but in kind.
Yet, inasmuch as a Christian perspective is but another theory or critical approach, it risks becoming, as other schools of criticism also risk becoming, a mere ideology. That risk has become reality in the current academic climate (not, of course, for the first or even the last time, but in these times, to be sure).
The rise of ideologies is a development tied to elements of both modernity and secularity. And, as with all other phenomena of any age in which the faith finds itself, Christianity is not immune from the power of ideological ways of thinking and being. David Koyzis defines an ideology as “a comprehensive science of ideas whereby the scientific method can be applied to gain understanding.”2 Ideologies, Koyzis says, “have a fundamentally distorted view of the world.”[rfn_note]Koyzis, Political Visions and Illusions, 15.[/efn_note]
This understanding of ideology illuminates why modern fundamentalist Christian views that require biblical interpretation to be yoked tightly to science specifically so easily slip into ideology. Part of what happened in the late modernity of the twentieth century (and today)—in both the academy and in certain elements of the Christian church is that ideology became more important than the common pursuit of truth. When ideology becomes supreme, truth is secondary whenever and wherever one ideology contradicts another—whether the ideology favored is advanced in the name of secularism or of religious faith.
The reactionary posture of some Christians in higher education, a posture taken, to be sure, in response to rising hostility from their liberal and secular counterparts, only exacerbates that hostility, Marsden explains. Reactionary measures—such as strict adherence to creation science or advocacy of mandated religious instruction in public schools—serve only to confirm secularists’ worst fears about the potential threats of the integration of faith and learning. This “negative impact” of the Religious Right and Christian fundamentalists thus encourages “some solutions that seem to threaten principles of equity in the treatment of religion in public life” (43).
Thus begins and perpetuates ad infinitum the fracturing and polarization Marsden writes of in the first edition of the book and, necessarily, picks up again in his new chapter, noting, correctly, that “intellectual fragmentation is more severe than ever” (132). With the recent rise of Christian nationalism, calls to execute citizens who violate certain moral codes, and even support for the repeal of the nineteenth amendment voiced by pastors with big social media platforms, this might be an understatement. Sadly, we have not “avoided the kind of fragmentation among ethno-religious cultures that we see in the former Marxist lands” after all (19–20). As Marsden notes in the new chapter of the book, the “flourishing of more nuanced Christian scholarship in the twenty-first century” is undercut by increased political polarization. Christian scholars today are opposed on one side by “secularist academics” and on the other by fellow Christians embittered toward the “elites” (143–44). In such a context, talk of integrating faith and learning and teaching Christian worldview seems, in the worst moments, quaint. Even so, it is still as needed as ever, perhaps even more so.
This fracturing redux is partly why, as I continued to teach and do scholarship within a conservative evangelical environment, I came to realize, with James K. A. Smith (who makes this argument in Desiring the Kingdom), that Christian worldview is not enough.3 As Smith argues, we are desiring creatures before we are thinking creatures. Merely integrating faith and intellect, religious belief and academic learning, as though they are entirely distinct, not embodied together, is not only not enough but may in some ways lead us slightly off the mark. “Slight,” during nuanced, complicated, ever-polarizing times, might be enough to be fatal.
But one outrageous idea of Christian scholarship is to embrace the need for ongoing correction and refining.
In the preface to the new edition of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Marsden notes that this update of the book owed in part to learning that some students today thought the book’s portrayal of “the academic world of the 1990s” seemed out of date (xiii). After two or three decades of more widespread dissemination, integration of faith and learning has become, in most Christian institutions of higher learning at least, axiomatic. Such a goal is in the learning outcomes of nearly every course, department, and program in a Christian school. Students and even most faculty know that faith isn’t limited to the fields of religion or theology proper.
Of course, if they do, it is owing in some considerable part to George Marsden.
Thus “outdated,” even if and where it might apply, is not quite the right metaphor. If the book is of an age, it is of an age when the need for Christian scholars to navigate between the Scylla of secularist academia and the Charybdis of fundamentalist indoctrination, was the most urgent religious need of the day. In so steering us, Marsden and other like-minded scholars and teachers have led the way forward for others to follow, learn from, and perhaps improve upon.
The two main arguments of the book, Marsden writes in the new preface, are still relevant: religious insights should be included within a diverse array of perspectives within academic discourse, and Christian virtues and doctrines can strengthen the intellectual life of Christian believers.
Concerning the first argument, I am less confident—given the “intellectual Wild West” (a phrase Marsden borrows from fellow historian Mark Noll) that characterizes the academy and the surrounding culture now—that gunslinging Christian scholars will effect more good than their gunslinging secular counterparts sauntering across the university range. If Christianity is just one perspective among others (and, again, Marsden is correct that it should be granted at least this status in the academy), I don’t foresee much but a return to the academy of a century ago that led us to our current place.
The Christian life is not, nor has it ever been (or should never have been), merely about right thinking. It is also about right feeling—right desiring, right ordering, right compassion, right loving. The Christian virtues, once fully possessed, make this second nature. It is true, we must first learn what is proper. Then we must want it. The job of the Christian scholar is to help others want what we want. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship does exactly that. It makes the reader want what Marsden set before us.
It is in Marsden’s exhortation to pursue Christian virtues and beauty where I find the most hope. Faith and learning are not so much separate human faculties that need integration but rather are more like miscible qualities that once connected cannot be discernably distinguished. Faith and learning are embodied—inseparably—within the life of the Christian (heart, mind, and soul) and within our communities. Faith embodied in learning and learning embodied in faith are expressed through virtue (or their lack in the lack of virtue). And beauty—which is goodness that is both moral and aesthetic—embodies and generates virtue. The fruit of integration of faith and learning is beauty itself. “If there are at least traces of beauty shaping scholarship,” Marsden concludes, “that can be a first step toward getting a hearing, even from those who would otherwise find our views outrageous” (149). And increasingly, those others aren’t only our secular counterparts—they are our brothers and sisters in the faith, too.
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Footnotes
- God’s Not Dead, written by Hunter Dennis, Chuck Konzelman, and Cary Solomon, directed by Harold Cronk (Pure Flix Productions, 2014).
- David T. Koyzis, Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (InterVarsity, 2003), 5.
- James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009).
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