Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/10/07/christianize_dartmouth.php
Friday, October 7, 2005
Editor's Note: As a part of the continuing series of retrospecitves in celebration of The Review's twenty-fifth anniversary, what follows is the text of a speech delivered at Rollins Chapel on January 21, 1998. Mr. Buckley's appearance was prompted by comments then Dartmouh President James O. Freedman made at the November 7, 1997 dedication of the Roth Center for Jewish Life and Culture—as reported in the New York Times the following day—and Mr. Buckley's subsequent letter to the editor of the Times, published November 18, 1997. Mr. Buckley's speech is printed in its entirety.
I was both pleased and grateful when Dartmouth's Hillel group last week voted to co-sponsor my appearance tonight, and honored that the Roth Center has planned a reception for me after my talk.
I begin, in part for my own sake, by reviewing the circumstances of my visit here. It happens that my talk tonight is only the most recent—who knows, perhaps the last—in a series of occasional appearances on this campus that began in the mid Fifties, bespeaking a common disposition, Dartmouth's and my own, to endure pain. I am especially anxious to move step by step because I have felt the need to clarify my own thinking on the subject of Christianity and higher education. The invitation from Mr. [Craig] Parker [of Navigators Christian Fellowship] was to expand on a short piece I did for the New York Times in November. It was triggered by the inauguration of the Roth Center here and attendant revelations about Dartmouth's past. Had I, Mr. Parker asked me in his letter, weighed sufficiently the implications of what I wrote on that occasion? I had written that in seeking to amend past injustices to Jewish students, Dartmouth ought not to feel any need to forswear its own traditional mission, which is (was?), to use the freighted word I so innocently used a few weeks ago, to Christianize its students.
The response to my summons in the New York Times was at several levels. The first was silence. A silence here amused, there awestruck. The critical reaction was two generations more wizened than when I made my first onward-Christian-soldiers charge. That was done in my book God and Man at Yale. Back then (1951), the dismay of college spokesmen was that anyone should think there was any need to issue any such summons. The religious orientation of Yale, they insisted, was under way, uninterrupted; all flags flying. A committee was deputized to explore the question. Its chairman reported that "there is today [at Yale], more than ever, widespread realization that religion alone can give meaning and purpose to modern life."
But the reaction now is of a very different kind. My teaching assistant at Yale—in November I was teaching a seminar there in English composition—is himself a Yale graduate, son and brother of Dartmouth graduates. He wrote to me asking whether I could seriously envision the Jewish president of Dartmouth uttering distinctively Christian preachments on life and manners to Dartmouth's student body. His position was not entirely antagonistic. The young Jewish scholar derided what he labeled the "cartoonishly politically correct" practices at Dartmouth of in effect eliminating "Silent Night" as a Christmastime Glee Club offering. He deplores the contortionist lengths, as described in my current book, that my own prep-school alma mater, the Millbrook School, goes to to conduct one hour's Christmas ceremonies without a single reference to Christmas, let alone to Christ.
At another level, the questions that arose were fundamental questions. The first was the sheer inconceivability that a university with feet so solidly encased in the concrete of secularism could be born again. Sure, one correspondent observed, it is true that as recently as in 1946 Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins reiterated his understanding that the continuing obligation of Dartmouth was to encourage Christian (Protestant) belief in its students. But since then, everything has changed. Yes, that's true. Almost everything has changed.
About the attitudes and conduct of universities that once hewed to the Christian line quite a lot has been written. There is Professor George Marsden, whose title tells the story of his book: The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. And there is Dan A. Oren's Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, which tells of flat-out exclusion of tenure for Jewish faculty in the social sciences and the humanities in those benighted days.
But a trend in the multiculturalist direction was under way. Admissions policies broadened, as if to reflect internal reorientations. In my book on Yale I had remarked the dilution of the Christian tradition. It was no longer the institutional lifeblood at Yale. I quoted from the inaugural address of the scholar who served as president of Yale during my undergraduate years. Charles Seymour had said in 1937, "I call on all members of the faculty as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism." Could any president of a major American university today, even assuming he privately nursed the convictions Mr. Seymour expressed, use such language at an inaugural ceremony? Just imagine hearing such formulations from the next president of Dartmouth. The repercussions would be immense: perplexity and even outrage among the faculty; almost certainly a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, complaining that 15 percent of Dartmouth's budget was being sent in by the Federal Government, some of it wrested from the pockets of honest and hardworking skeptics, incensed now by their involuntary subsidy of that swinging evangelical, freshly installed as president of Dartmouth by a sleepy board of trustees ignorant of modern times.
A third response was simply curious. It asked, in effect, What can be done to advance Christianity—assuming the will to do anything at all? Can Christianity be practiced corporately at college level without engendering, at best, intercredal incivility; at worst, confrontational hostility?
For convenience, in this brief exploration, I omit mention of religions other than Christianity and Judaism. I ignore whatever complications Catholic Christianity could hypothetically present. No doubt there are curricular ambitions aborning from Buddhism and Islam. I intend no condescension in ignoring them. I do so purely for analytical convenience.
The spotlight, as focused last November by President Freedman, is on Christianity and Judaism, and I am supposed to contemplate the question, What in fact could be done? We return to what precipitated the exchange in the New York Times. It was at the formal opening of the Roth Center for Jewish Life and Culture that President Freedman disclosed the history of Dartmouth's quota on Jewish students. Now the presumed design of the Roth Center is to invigorate Jewish life and culture, which certainly includes Jewish religion. It was the official enthusiasm shown by Mr. Freedman and others for this enterprise that prompted me to ask whether, even as the Roth Center is designed to Judaize Jews, Dartmouth mightn't explore more vigorous means of Christianizing non-Jews. I asked, "In welcoming students from other creeds, is it expected that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?" I went on to ask the question which I judge it is my primary responsibility here tonight to explore. As I put it, "Is an effort to inculcate Christian values and Christian teaching a morphological act of anti-Semitism?"
That question needs to be probed at levels religious, social, and political. It is useful to begin by asking what it is that Judaism and Christianity have in common. The answer is a great deal. Irving Kristol put it succinctly: "Like the greatest Jewish theologian of this century, Franz Rosenzweig, I see Christianity as a sister religion to Judaism, as a form of 'Judaism for the Gentiles." The two faiths have in common the (monotheistic) belief in a single God. The Old Testament is the structural and historical springboard of Christianity. The division comes in primarily on the question of Jesus, revered by Christians as the Incarnation, ignored—or reviled—by Jews as a failed prophet at best, an impostor at worst.
Whether Franz Rosenzweig was correct in calling them sister religions is a matter of perspective. But it is useful to bear in mind that day-to-day differences are mostly liturgical. Moral codes, with differing emphases on faith and on the laws, are held in common by the two faiths. There is no sovereign social commandment spoken in the Old Testament that is profaned or defiled—how could it be so?—in the New Testament. The deportment of Jews obedient to their laws, and of Christians faithful to theirs, would expose no important differences in conduct.
But credal differences do tend to generate social differences, and some of these have political faces. The overwhelming datum here, dominating all emotion and much thought, is the history of racial and ethnic discrimination. From the practice of it in the United States, salutary lessons have been drawn. From the genocidal lengths to which discrimination has been practiced abroad, we learn terrifying truths. The memory of discriminatory practices, as for instance at Dartmouth and Yale, engendered credal fears and derivative political stands. Most conspicuous of them, in the past half-century, have been the fear of hegemonic concentrations of religious authority, and a lively concern for minorities. The relative unanimity of Jewish concern for the beleaguered Negro after the war is widely understood as an expression of fraternal support from one American group itself once beleaguered, to another still suffering. Conspicuous also, in this survey, is the relative solidarity of Jewish objection to Christian practices except when done under formally Christian auspices. In support of this bias, a whole constitutional vocabulary sprang up. The word Christian is not used, but Christianity is the special target of the judicial inquisition, even though it is ostensibly comprehensive in its anti-religious reach. It is a ban that extends equally to Jewish impertinences in public situations. Thus in 1989 the constitutional objection to an invocation at the Commencement ceremony of a public junior high school in Rhode Island—because it was pronounced, not by a minister or priest (their benedictions would also be forbidden), but by a rabbi. The Supreme Court solemnly weighed in—Lee v. Weisman, June 24, 1992—on the unconstitutionality of the rabbinical blessing and, even as we speak, is hearing the dolorous cries of an affronted petitioner in Alabama. There the objection is to the exposure of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse in Etowah County, a complaint that is chugging its way up the shadowy judicial ladder in serene expectation of coming, finally, on the liberating incandescence of that clause in the First Amendment that beams out its guarantees against an established national religion.
What is this strange commotion, in the name of protection from a national church? Six years ago, in my book In Search of Anti-Semitism, I relayed the views, once again, of Irving Kristol. Surveying the religion-in-schools scene he noticed a "tension . . . now building up between Jews and Christians [which] has very little to do with traditional discrimination, and everything to do with efforts by liberals—among whom, I regret to say, Jews are both numerous and prominent—to establish a wall between religion and society in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state." Mr. Kristol went on to say that he himself believes "the secular era [is]...fading, that Jews" (at least, as he put it, "those who remain Jews) will become more Jewish, Christians more Christian, Moslems more Moslem, Hindus more Hindu, etc." He concluded: "There is a majority culture in this country, it is Christian, white, middle-class. Jews and nonbelievers (I am both) are outsiders to some extent in that culture."
If Irving Kristol is correct in saying that there is a majority culture and that it is Christian, what of the modern university? Is it only an enclave, pure and simple? Dartmouth, like so many of the elite universities, has Christian roots. Are these roots relevant to its current purposes? The temptation in answering that question—the easiest way out, and perhaps the only way out—is to say, No: they are irrelevant. But surely before we opt for instant deracination we should give a little thought to the Dartmouth of Ernest Martin Hopkins—as to the Yale of Charles Seymour—and ask: What happened? What happened that makes it somehow absurd even to hint at a corporate commitment to a religious faith, when to do so was commonplace in mid-century?
There have been two groundswells, one ideological, the second philosophical. On the first of these we have already touched, the idea that to show preference for any one religion is somehow unfair, aggressive, inconsistent with the very idea of equal rights for all religions. But that ideological perspective, an extension of the egalitarian imperative, brushes up against quite conventionally accepted rights of majorities, the right—cited, in this instance, by Irving Kristol—of a community to acknowledge the symbols and pronounce the ideals of the majority. This is of course the accepted practice in public life, in democratic politics, where the majority elects the leader and sets congregational rules that prevail during the tenure of that administration. It is not challenged that a college founded by evangelical Christians, or by and for observant Jews, should be free to organize college life and curriculum consistent with the indoctrinational ends of the institution. On the contrary, that is expected.
But the dividing line is quickly drawn. We begin by saying of a teaching institution that it is "secular," i.e., worldly, rather than spiritual. This inflection is not emasculating when narrowly applied. Nobody expects courses in Christian physics. The handiest next device for turning the curriculum loose is of course "academic freedom." The arguments for academic freedom are quickly marshaled and very persuasive. They include the doctrine's usefulness in academic research, an intellectual mobility we quickly appreciate for the most obvious reasons: If there is no stated objective to be achieved, no confining discipline to repress us, the researcher's freedom is enhanced. All very well, but of course at some point the offices of a teaching college assert themselves: there are one thousand students who enter Dartmouth as freshmen and will want, four years later, to be acquainted with some of the deposits of learning of the last three millennia, and perhaps with a few coordinates that enhance the meaning of life itself, and some knowledge of the religion that was an animating source of republican idealism. Any doubts we have on the matter can be settled by reading the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., whose life we celebrate while tending to ignore what he always cited—as Abraham Lincoln did—as the ground of his idealism.
Academic freedom, fifty years ago, was most frequently acclaimed as protecting a scholar indifferent to or dissenting from establishmentarian religion or economics or politics. But more, really, was going on during this period. The academy's own establishment was gestating, and it is now pretty well fullborn. The new canon rules that religion is, well, appropriately left behind in our culture of science.
What evidence do we have of this progressive demotion of religion by the culture of science? Professor David Hollinger of the University of California at Berkeley has published a book—Science, Jews, and Secular Culture—from which much that is informative is conveniently derived. Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English here at Dartmouth, summarizes one of Hollinger's points. It is that, at the moment, the secular perspective has "won the cognitive battle," to use the relevant language. The religious perspective has for the time being lost the battle to be thought of as "true," "in the sense that E=mc2 is true," to use Professor Hart's language.
Now, Professor Hollinger is telling us—and he is a very learned sociologist—that in the substantive sense science is thought by academic thinkers to be "true" on a playing field where the religious world view is not true. That this is the academic consensus is hard to deny. The idea that Christianity might be true is not even entertained in most academic laboratories, let alone seriously explored. "Christianity marched into the modern era as the strongest, most institutionally endowed cultural program in the Western world," writes Hollinger. He continues, "The people in charge of this program tried through a variety of methods, some more coercive than others, to implant Christian doctrines and practices in as much of the globe as they could. Yet, as the centuries went forward, this extraordinary empire of power/knowledge lost some of the ground it had once held. Christianity at the end of the twentieth century—the 'Christian Century,' prophesied by the Protestant hegemonists at its start—is less triumphant in the North Atlantic West than it was in 1500 or 1700 or 1900."
Not withstanding this dispiriting narrative, there is the perverse refusal, if the phrase is correct, of religion to perish by any sword, not physical, not archaeological, not anthropological, not biochemical, not historical, not, indeed, philosophical. Professor Hollinger appears, in passing, to acknowledge as much when he writes, ". . . Christianity's continuing adherents include some of the most thoughtful and learned men and women in the world—as I believe they do—[but] the [secularist] trend is nonetheless real, and the historian's obligation to understand it is no less compelling."
He cites Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Mr. Kuhn argues that science has always been a collective enterprise. That is, scientific researchers do not go off in individual directions to discover this or that. Rather they pursue paths collectively agreed upon by what might be thought of as a "paradigm." The extant scientific paradigm is satisfied that present research "covers the facts." Most scientists, most of the time -- we are to understand --pursue their research within the going paradigm. Researchers go happily forward, making advances and exacting refinements, until suddenly the circle comes up that won't fit in the square hole that stares them in the face. The effort is then made to stretch the going paradigm, but finally a new one is needed to "cover the new facts," even as the Newtonian paradigm had to be changed to make way for subatomic particles and high-velocity physics, which amounted to a new "wing" on the Newtonian paradigm and a new direction for collective research, leading, I am reliably informed, to quantum mechanics. And now the question is at least tantalizing whether the anthropic paradigm will assert itself not merely as convenient to astrophysicists, but perhaps as undeniable.
I am ill at ease when dealing with physics, but I think that the question being raised is suitably addressed to the layman's generic curiosity. The question is, Which of two alternative explanations of human life is more plausible, that put forward by materialist evolution, or that which argues a superintending intelligence? The explorations are greatly varied, but notice is dramatically drawn to the conference of international scientists that met in Cracow in 1973 where Professor Brandon Carter rather timidly advanced the view that what we now know about the physical narrative of our cosmos is that one day it did in fact begin, with what they call the Big Bang, and that multiple variables needed to play out in bizarre coordination with each other by which only a single apparent purpose was served, namely to make possible human life. He called this the anthropic principle. I am benumbed by numbers on galactic scales, but even minds primitively educated in science are arrested by some of the data currently going the rounds. What is the probability that a bullet randomly fired from the earth will hit a one-inch target at a distance of twenty billion light years? The answer, I'm told, is 10 to the 60th power. Do we know how many atoms there are in the known universe? Well, I know, because I've been told that the answer is 10 to the 80th power. I am then told that scientists consider any random event as unlikely as 10 to the 50th power to be, quite simply, impossible; which makes daunting the idea of the monkey randomly typing down the passage from Macbeth that closes with, "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing." The chances of that happening can be put down at 10 to the 536th power.
But all of this tells us nothing more than that there are paradigms on the move, and that alert scholarship must inevitably take these matters into account, or run the risk run by those blind to the demonstrations of Galileo. To be sure, to acknowledge that there was a Prime Mover is less than to certify either the God of Moses or the God of Christ. But it is heartening for those drawn to a religious view of the world to know that the operative paradigm is no reason for their current dishevelment. "I see it as one of the greatest ironies of this ironical time," Malcolm Muggeridge wrote 15 years ago, "that the Christian message should be withdrawn for consideration just when it is most desperately needed to save men's reason, if not their souls. It is as though a Salvation Army band, valiantly and patiently waiting through the long years for Judgment Day, should, when it comes at last, and the heavens do veritably begin to unfold like a a scroll, throw away their instruments and flee in terror."
So we ask, What did President Hopkins mean when he spoke about Christianizing Dartmouth students? Presumably a little more than teaching them not to cheat at cards. One supposes that he had in mind the strength that especially attaches to idealism grounded in religious belief. The crime rate in Israel is lower among observant Jews than non-observant Jews. As a practical matter, what might the next president of Dartmouth do, if persuaded to revive Dartmouth's mandate? What has the retiring president done? The only time I have ever spent in the company of President Freedman was at a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Temple Emanu-El in New York City. We were two of six speakers, no one of whom, if memory serves, spoke words disruptive of the evening's decorum. What are we afraid of? The coexistence of Judaism and Christianity is not imperiled in the United States. Why should we assume that a self-confident Jewish university president would be affronted by the recitation of a Christian prayer or the singing of a Christian hymn in his presence? We recall Yogi Berra's comment when told that a Jew had been elected mayor of Dublin: "Only in America," he exulted. Is it reasonable, in a country in which all parties are unambiguously united in the resolve to guarantee religious freedom, to affirm the freedom of religion by inhibiting its exercise? Should we, out of an unrealistic fear of giving offense, deprive ourselves of satisfactions to which the majority of a college community are entitled? Those deferences one rightly expects to enjoy when living in a society whose profile Irving Kristol accurately describes. Might a college president, in such circumstances, search out two or three learned scholars intending to situate them to teach pivotal courses in philosophy and history? Might not classes be suspended on Good Friday, and religious exhortations cited at convocations? Why sap the joy of a religious tradition, which is what we seem to be doing by pledging, on Christmas Day, not to let the image of the Christ-child pass through the mind or, on Easter, to shut off any inclination to dwell on the Resurrection?
But all of the foregoing is, in a sense, rhetorically detached, even desiccated, the talk of religion and academic freedom and institutional histories and wayward paradigms. I want to leave my hosts, the Protestant and Jewish ministries, with some sense of my shared partisanship with one understanding they absolutely have in common, those of you who believe. I close then with the final paragraph from Paul Elmer More's essay on Thomas Huxley. It caught my eye forty years ago, and I take from it now the undergirding confidence I share with your ministries. More wrote about the clash of the Darwinian model with the religious traditions of Oxford: in 1864, there was a Diocesan Conference at Oxford. There chanced at this time to be in the neighborhood a man who was neither priest nor scientist, a man given to absurd freaks of intellectual charlatanry, yet showing at times also such marvelous and sudden penetration into the heart of things as comes only to genius. It was Disraeli. "He lounged into the assembly," so the scene is described by Froude, "in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes." And then, turning to the presiding officer, the same Bishop Wilberforce whom four years earlier Huxley had so crushingly rebuked, he uttered one of his enigmatic and unforgettable epigrams: "What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my Lord, am on the side of the angels." The audience, not kindly disposed to the speaker, applauded the words as a jest; they were carried the next day over the whole land by the newspapers; they have often been repeated as an example of Disraeli's brilliant but empty wit. I suspect [Professor More concluded] that beneath their surface glitter, and hidden within their metaphor, pointed to suit an Oriental taste, these words contain a truth that shall some day break to pieces the new philosophy which Huxley spent his life so devotedly to establish.