Theism, Atheism and the Divine

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, May 27, 1998

William F. Buckley made his name by writing, in 1952, an indictment of the emergant secular university, God and Man at Yale. His work drew two quick responses from the academy.

The first, from those more staid academic stalwarts, was bald and irrational denial. The second, from more liberally-minded academic circles, was 'So What?' In 1952, the academy already took 'secular' as a necessary precondition for 'intellectual.'

Whether or not you agree with his political bent does not ultimately matter. Buckley, in 1952, was right: the academy and its associated paraphenalia that together constitute the university were both already secular. The four decades subsequent have only finalized that trend.

The secular university has, in the intervening decades, produced a professional secular scholar-class whose aim is research, and these professors have foisted upon the university a series of rather nasty intellectual imperatives — multiculturalism, deconstructionism, and the associated vices of the new academy.

These imperatives have taken on independent vitality, and now threaten the last reserve of those values of the institutionalized religion and the religious institution which Buckley espoused four decades ago — the divinity schools.

Steven Menashi's article (page 6) and Christian Hummel's interview with (page
7) together reveal the changes in the intellectual program of the divinity school. This shift in program notes the sad totality of the academy's capitulation to the
imperatives of deconstructionist logic.

It also notes the collapse of institutional advocacy of tradition — the church and the academy, the two classic defenders of intellectual rigor and moral tradition, seem now steeped in the gospels of the tolerance cult.

I cannot claim real religious experience. Religion has always been a closed book to me, its conclusions presumed.

The political defense of the classic intellectual construction of the divinity school, and indeed of traditional religion in larger terms, does not demand a theist reference point.

Their spiritual connections aside, clergymen remain figures of influence in educational and communal arenas. Their education, therefore, should not be hastily given over to the manifestoed prophets of the deconstruction impulse.

The notation of the decline of divinity schools rests on two central points. The first is the absence of any rigorous standards of admissions. Sad and disappointing this may be, but it hardly seems reversible. It seems instead the product of contemporary zeitgeist, with religion a disappearing priority. The second is the concurrent collapse of standards of intellectual rigor. This too may be taken as a product of the modern mindset, but it need not be accepted as inevitable.

I believe intellectual secularism is a worthy impulse. The division of academic pursuit from prejudicial agendas seems a necessary precondition for dynamic study — scholarship for its own sake.

I also believe, however, that intellectual secularism has been given a bad rap by those who claim to adhere most strongly to its tenets. Intellectual secularism and intellectual rigor can exist in mutual harmony.

The case of the divinity schools, however, provides an unhappy footnote to the recent history of the university. The political products of intellectual secularism have proven far too dynamic for the good of the academy, now a corrupt body in itself. Secularism, in the form of its perverse political permutations, thus invades the church.

Theism, Atheism and the Divine

Article Tools

Related Articles