The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Second Edition
I wish to begin by thanking Christian Scholar’s Review for the opportunity and privilege to comment on the second edition of George Marsden’s Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. I first read this book as a student at Grove City College in the mid-2000s, where it was assigned in an upper-level history seminar. I have been profoundly shaped by it and have in recent years assigned it to my own students in an “Introduction to History” course as part of our conversation about faith and learning. For this forum, it is my pleasure to offer a few thoughts about the present-day utility of the book’s argument, examine a few recent examples of Christian scholarship in the field of history, and suggest what the new chapter contributes to the revised edition.
Despite the fact that the book is close to thirty years old, the argument itself is still logical and sound. Who, for example, could dispute the veracity and relevance of Marsden’s opening line: “contemporary university culture is hollow at its core” (1)? Now more than ever public universities are finding it difficult to justify their institutional missions except in the most utilitarian of terms. With very little societal consensus about what constitutes the good life, human flourishing, the cultivation of wisdom, or even the promotion of national interests, it is nearly impossible for higher education to espouse and promulgate a coherent and compelling vision of its raison d’être (except, again, in its ability to grant future workers the ability to earn high wages). Campus speech codes, culture wars, perceived liberal bias, the fragmentation of learning, and other problems have only confirmed Marsden’s original interpretation of American university life as a kind of intellectual free-for-all where secular beliefs are privileged.
Marsden’s modest proposal—that scholarship informed by Christian “background beliefs” should be welcomed on equal terms and might actually make a difference for the interpretation of some important scholarly issues—also continues to seem eminently reasonable to me. Chapter five, “The Positive Contributions of Theological Context,” is especially helpful in this regard. In it Marsden lays out several theological categories such as “creation,” “incarnation,” and “the human condition” that he believes have special relevance for scholarship. For example, openness to a Creator God would challenge purely materialistic conceptions of the universe as the product of chance. Such a view would certainly affect interpretive issues in the hard sciences, Marsden acknowledges, but it might have even greater implications for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences (97).
The reality of the incarnation, Marsden argues in turn, should allow Christian scholars to pursue questions related to the supernatural. If it is true that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, then our world cannot be thought of merely as a “closed” system where all phenomena can be explained by natural means. Thinking Christianly about the human condition, Marsden maintains, allows for a complex view of humanity that sees people as capable of great good but also filled with evil. A Christian view of the human condition dignifies people on the one hand as beings created by God himself but on the other hand precludes an anthropology that sees human beings as the center of the universe.
Marsden’s discussion of the human condition is perhaps the most helpful in my field of history. Like Marsden, I am an evangelical Protestant in the Reformed tradition. Although some Christians may associate Calvinism with Eeyore-like gloom about the state of humanity, I would argue that it is a realistic depiction of our fallenness. It is not hard to see how such presuppositions (or “background beliefs”) might influence how a historian writes biography, interprets a controversial figure, or judges the prospects of utopian movements. At its best, a Reformed view of the human condition should shield historians from treating their subjects as either sinless saints or irredeemable villains.
Such ideas can and should trickle down to our students as well. As a professor at a Christian college, I have found Marsden’s insights about the human condition to be some of the most helpful and relatable ones for Gen Z students. In the past I have assigned this chapter of the book in conjunction with chapter five of John Fea’s Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past (itself now out in a second edition).1 Fea’s chapter, “Christian Resources for the Study of the Past,” covers similar themes albeit with some different emphases. Both Marsden and Fea agree that Christian theological categories matter a great deal for how historians think about the human subjects they study. I have had many conversations with students over the years about how we might evaluate historical figures from a Christian point of view. These conversations are always informed by a theological view (drawn from Marsden, Fea, and others) that emphasizes all people as bearing the image of God and thus entitled to respect and dignity. Our discussions also come back to the fact that all people are sinners (Romans 3:23) and thus imperfect. Drawing on observations from historian Tracy McKenzie, we often conclude by reminding each other that we can have “heroes, not idols.”2 In a world where simplistic and triumphalist historical judgments predominate in popular culture, today’s students crave direction about how to consider with maturity the achievements and failures of people of the past. Marsden’s theological categories provide a real basis for such discussions.
Despite the worthiness and ongoing relevance of Marsden’s argument, there are some places where it does show its age. For one, there are some outdated references to institutions. The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College no longer exists. (Happily, a sort of successor program, the Evangelical Studies Program affiliated with Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, does.) In light of its having recently been designated a Research-1 institution by Carnegie, officials at Baylor today might also dispute the statement that “there are no Protestant research universities that approach anything like the first rank” (119).
Even more significantly, although Christian scholarship is alive and well in 2025, it is questionable whether Marsden’s argument has made much of an impact on secular university life over the last thirty years. In his Christian Scholar’s Review blog post, “Reading George Marsden with Gen Z,” Jay Green laments the politicization of both American evangelicalism and higher education, developments that have made it even harder than in the 1990s to have constructive conversations, or, in Green’s word, “détente” between the two sides.3 Certainly Marsden’s optimistic sense that faith-informed perspectives might gain an equal seat at the table alongside feminist, gay, neo-conservative, and Marxist perspectives has failed to occur. The original edition of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship was published when postmodern perspectives were at their pinnacle of influence, and when it was plausible to think of religiously-informed views as another perspective entitled to a hearing. As postmodernism has somewhat receded in academia, however, the cogency of Marsden’s original argument has been somewhat lost in this regard.
What has been lasting and valuable, however, are the ever-multiplying examples of Christian scholarship that explicitly or implicitly owe their success to Marsden’s generation, a generation who paved the way intellectually and institutionally. In my own field of history, quite a few books bearing the mark of these perspectives have appeared in relatively recent years. A short, admittedly idiosyncratic, list follows. All of these books were published with excellent presses and several of them with the best secular university presses.
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, where only a scholar steeped in Catholicism could ask the kind of questions Gregory asks about the legacy of the Protestant Reformation.4
Thomas Kidd’s Who is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis, where Kidd (a student of Marsden) attempts as a self-identified evangelical to disentangle the global, centuries-old movement from its popular association with only white Republicans in the twenty-first century.5
Tracy McKenzie’s We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy, where McKenzie’s attention to shifting views of human nature in the early American republic emerges from his own concern about what American democracy has wrought in the popularity of Donald Trump.6
Daniel Silliman’s One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, where Silliman (through Nixon) wrestles with categories of grace and redemption in a heart-wrenching biography.7
Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible, where Eire takes seriously (although not gullibly) accounts of the miraculous as they have appeared in church history.8
Certainly, these examples are only a fraction of the kind of scholarship I am talking about, but they represent (for me) the fruit that Marsden’s ideas continue to bear a generation later.
Marsden and Oxford University Press were wise to issue a new concluding chapter with the second edition. In it Marsden reflects on some things that have changed in higher education since 1997 and brings some contemporary authors (e.g. David Brooks, John Inazu) into the conversation. Marsden still advocates for Christian perspectives to be heard, conceiving of Christian witness there as a “faithful presence” (borrowing James Davison Hunter’s term) (137). Although Marsden lauds Christian liberal arts colleges, he has not completely given up hope on the possibility of Christian scholars impacting wider society; there is no hint of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” here.9 In the “intellectual Wild West” (Mark Noll’s phrase) of contemporary higher education, Marsden says, Christians ought to be models of civility and advocates for pluralism (132). Inspired by Augustine and Jonathan Edwards, he contends that they should be humble and gentle disciples of Jesus Christ, ever ready to direct a lost world to the beauty of the gospel. This emphasis on the Christian life as well as the Christian mind is a persuasive and fitting conclusion to the book.
Marsden also suggests that Christian scholars ought to serve the church as well as the academy. He suggests that scholarship conducted by believers “might act like part of an immune system that helps protect against infections by faddish populist beliefs” (145). Here I would also affirm Marsden’s judgment. I recently concluded teaching a fifteen-week adult Sunday School class at my church on the topic of American religious history. Most weeks I had an attentive and eager audience of about fifty people. Of course there was an occasional stray comment or point of view that was not helpful, but overall we had excellent sessions of deep learning and engagement. And that learning went both ways, as I benefited from the insights and life experiences of those in the class. I have confidence that all of us left with a deeper sense of America’s religious history and our role in it as a church body today. If they (and the church elders!) are willing, this is the sort of impact that Christian scholars might have outside of the university classroom.
Taken as a whole, the second edition of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship is a boon for the academy and the church. I hope it inspires a new generation of scholars to reflect on how the transcendent truths of Christianity might bear on the immanent topics of our scholarship.
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Footnotes
- John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2024).
- Robert Tracy McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History (InterVarsity, 2013), 72–97.
- Jay Green, “Reading George Marsden with Gen Z,” Christian Scholar’s Review (blog), Christian Scholar’s Review, July 2, 2021, https://christianscholars.com/reading-george-marsden-with-gen-z/.
- Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012).
- Thomas S. Kidd, Who is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2019).
- Robert Tracy McKenzie, We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy (InterVarsity, 2021).
- Daniel Silliman, One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation (Eerdmans, 2024).
- Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2023).
- Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (Sentinel, 2017).
