Ending the Secularist Crusade

By Emily Esfahani-Smith | Saturday, October 4, 2008

The history of Dartmouth College is a religious history, as any person involved in campus religious life is quick to point out. Dartmouth was founded on an evangelical impulse by Eleazar Wheelock. He had a mind to educate and convert the local Indian natives to Christianity. Wheelock, whose stormy sermons would provoke his audience to tears, worked with Samson Occom to pursue these goals. Occom was a Mohegan Indian who converted to Christianity during the heat of the Great Awakening. Occom admired Wheelock’s vision for Dartmouth College, then called the Indian Charity School. In 1769, a formal charter christened the place as Dartmouth College.

But these days, very little remains of Wheelock’s grand religious vision. Since the retirement of President William Jewett Tucker in 1909, for whom the Tucker Foundation (devoted to morality and spirituality) was named, the religious imperative of the College has waned. Indeed, it has moved decisively in a secular, if not anti-religious, direction. Tucker, interestingly, was the College’s last ministerial president.

Though we don’t expect the next College president to be a minister, it would be nice if he was not openly hostile to religion, as so many academics and administrators on this campus seem to be. One college Dean alleges that these days one third of all professors on campus are atheists or agnostics, and some are anxious to let their open-minded students aware of their convictions. One professor in the religion department told an enlightening story to illuminate this point on the first day of her religion class. She was explaining to the class her use of “B.C.E.” and “C.E.” for dates, as opposed to “B.C.” and “A.D.,” which of course line dates up according to their relationship to the birth of Christ.

She told the class that she was lecturing at a local church one day, and in the course of her lecture she used dates followed by “B.C.E.” or “C.E.” instead of “B.C.” and “A.D.” When one of the Christian men in the parish asked her why she used the secular variant, she replied—and it was a rather hostile reply, as she recreated it there that day in class— “We’re not living in a Christian world anymore. The United States isn’t a Christian nation.”

This is the mindset of at least one of our religion professors, and this hostility to Western religion and tradition penetrates the academy as a whole. For reasons that seem strange, maybe even Freudian, religion departments tend to attract the most anti-religious and rabidly liberal of all professors on college campuses. (Speaking of rabidly liberal, just a few months ago, a Review editor happened to overhear another Dartmouth religion professor, in a mad rant, blame the Holocaust on America, or at least the half that is Republican—but we’ll save that story for another editorial).

Such hostility towards religion, especially Western religion, runs contrary to the mission of any liberal arts institution. Professor Kevin Reinhart, a prominent member of the religion department, puts it best when he says, “I think that the study of religion is one of those areas of study that is indispensible for the liberal arts education.” No part of the human experience has been untouched by the influence of religion, after all—and if a liberal arts education is meant to teach students about the human experience against the backdrop of the Western world, religion must play a part in that education. Religion, Professor Reinhart explains, “is the domain where humans have tried to be aware of themselves as humans.”

The idea of human dignity is one of the most basic, helpful ideas we get from religion, and it informs not only theological debates but also political and public policy-oriented debates. From abortion, to Guantanamo, to stem cell research: without a sense of what human dignity is and where its intellectual origin lies (I’ll give you a hint: not Darwin), then you are just parroting for or against what you read on the New York Times’ editorial page, no matter what side of the issue you fall on.

At Dartmouth, we are, whether we like the term or not, part of an “intellectual elite” more akin to the chattering classes of this nation than to the contemplative monks in a monastery. We do a lot of talking, a lot of “community organizing,” and a lot of doing, but we fall short on understanding—on wisdom. The College, though it no longer has a mission to convert its students to Christianity, still dons the label of a liberal arts school.

Part of a liberal arts education is the study of religion, from which we learn what human dignity is and how to cultivate it with understanding and ultimately wisdom. In short, the study of religion makes us wiser people. The studies of philosophy, literature, art, and history are all part of a liberal arts education, but they, in some ways, are secondary to the study of religion. Those former disciplines want to understand the human experience through narrower senses, while religion wants to understand it in its most cosmic sense.

Professor Marlene Heck, who teaches in the Art History department and is married to Professor Reinhart, explains, “To study religion is to study history, culture, geography, language, philosophy, art and architecture, and it opens into important exchanges regarding political principles and scientific possibilities.”

Instead of teaching students anything relating to this, though, the College is knee-capped by the imperatives of Political Correctness. Freshman orientation is a good gauge of the College’s teaching agenda. This year, as always, orientation was a week-long procession of mandatory events that were more keen on sexual awareness talks and panels on G-BLT (Gay-Bacon-Lettuce-Tomatos) than on spiritual life. And until recently, the last institutionalized center for moral and spiritual life on campus, the Tucker Foundation, was growing increasingly secular in its community service aims, now divorced from any transcendental purpose. Once upon a time, the Tucker Foundation served as a center for religious reflection and good works to honor the aims of President Emeritus William Jewett Tucker. Under previous deans, that mission fell to the wayside.

The new dean of Tucker, College Chaplain Richard Crocker, is in a unique position to revitalize and renew the role of religion and religious studies on this campus. He has also expressed his wish, in conversation with The Dartmouth Review, to reincorporate elements of faith into the service that Tucker is committed to, and to reassert the moral and spiritual dimensions into the good work that the organization does. For these reasons, The Dartmouth Review is excited to congratulate Dean Crocker on his recent promotion, and we wish him the best of luck in driving the role of morality and spirituality back into the public conversation on this campus.

Ending the Secularist Crusade

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