Churches have a similar PR problem. About the same proportion of Americans say they place significant confidence in organized religion (down from roughly 60 percent a generation ago). In the decades since the Vietnam War, Americans’ faith in all kinds of big institutions has collapsed.
In an era when the White House press secretary announces a funding freeze on “wokeness” while flaunting a giant cross necklace, it’s easy to assume that traditional Christianity and secular academia are permanent enemies, on opposite sides of some civilizational chasm. But in fact, the fates of churches and universities have long been intertwined. For academics grappling with how to regain public trust, there are surprising lessons in the recent Christian resurgence—and, perhaps, a counterintuitive strategy for turning the current campaign to cripple and humiliate universities into an occasion to recover core ideas about the purpose of higher education.
It’s important not to romanticize the intellectual’s status in the shadow of God and Man at Yale and Joseph McCarthy’s fulminations. But even historian Richard Hofstadter—author of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and the reigning expert on the subject—expressed relief that “Washington has again become so hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars.”
This spirit of critical patriotism extended into the classroom. After World War II, colleges nationwide drew inspiration from Harvard’s 1945 report, General Education in a Free Society, which recommended assigning “great classic books” to help students “reconcile the sense of pattern and direction deriving from heritage with the sense of experiment and innovation deriving from science.” The point was to study history, philosophy, and literature with an eye toward the long time horizon of a civilization rather than the immediate demands of the job market or election cycle. Yes, American universities were helping to fight the Cold War by focusing research on the space race and other military applications (thanks to unprecedented levels of federal funding). But they also nurtured a counterculture: not in the sense of a political underground, but in resistance to utilitarian pressures to define “useful skills” narrowly.
That loss of trust has gradually extended to their own institutional homes, the universities themselves—especially as vocational majors like communications, exercise science, and engineering have won over student interest and administration support. In an effort to cope with the resulting crisis of purpose—and feeling, increasingly, like the have-nots of the academic prestige hierarchy—some humanists have found a new identity in the culture-war tendency to politicize all parts of life and deem certain academic methods and topics ideologically unacceptable.
The term should describe a space that questions the values and practices of the dominant society from every angle, not just political ones. A university should provide a haven for unfashionable ideas and practices in the broadest sense: a home for reading long books, studying dead languages, questioning popular slogans, and taking the long-range view in a society that emphasizes immediate returns. These practices require a certain confidence in your civilization and in the university as an institution—a faith that you exist in a community with old things worth preserving and mighty goals worth striving for.
Conservative churches made an idol out of politics as well. But their continued emphasis on Christianity’s ancient, supernatural core helped them thrive until the twenty-first century, when they could no longer resist the anti-institutionalist current in American culture. Membership in Southern Baptist churches, for example, has shrunk by nearly a quarter in the past two decades.
It’s too early to speak of full-fledged revival, but this upswing in religious engagement offers lessons for universities. The churches that seem to be rebounding are the ones that embrace countercultural aspects of Christianity. These Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Holy Spirit–minded Protestants are not the Christians who spent the last century trying to update “premodern” beliefs to fit the demands of Western progressivism and scientism. They don’t shy away from outrageous supernatural claims, or rituals that puzzle outsiders, or traditional teachings on sexuality and gender.
We have unwittingly undermined our side of the academic social contract, which used to promise students intellectual experiences that they could find nowhere else: a chance to gain broad perspective on their communities, and the invitation to form their own judgments about questions of ultimate concern. When the AI revolution came along and offered students a shortcut, a way to simulate their side of the contract without learning or thinking very much, it’s no wonder they took it. And when the Trump administration began insisting that the highest goal that most universities aim for is a baldly partisan one, many Americans believed it.
Repairing universities’ eroded culture, community, and mission is the work of a generation. But there is one radical act that professors and students can undertake right now: sit in a room together, put everyone’s phones in a shoebox, and spend at least an hour reading a book, in hard copy. In other words, restore counterculture to the classroom, and remember that “our subject is a vast one—since it concerns the totality of human experience,” as Dexter Perkins, the president of the American Historical Association, told his colleagues in 1956. He hoped their students would become “neither cynics nor visionaries but well-balanced citizens”—citizens who learn to see, one hopes, the difference between reforming institutions and destroying them.
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