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Review Essay: Religion in American Academic Life

The idea that religious perspectives might play a significant role in American academic life, and even be brought to bear on such secular topics as engineering and sociology, strikes most academics today as rather odd. Indeed, Bruce Kuklick, the distinguished historian of American thought at the University of Pennsylvania, once said that fellow historian George Marsden's assertion that Christian intellectual perspectives had a legitimate place in the academy was "loony."' Yet, as Marsden and the authors of three other important studies show, Christianity has played an important role in American higher education over the past century. In some ironic ways, it even helped to shape the pervasively secular ethos that prevails in academe today and that lies behind Kuklick's reaction. The story of higher education's secularization has been told before, and, indeed, it has been an important subtheme of several of the standard accounts of the rise and development of the modern university. In Richard Hofstadter's and Walter Metzger's The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (1955), Laurence Vesey's The Emergence of the American University (1965), Christopher Jencks'