As we mentioned in the first email of our series, the secular worldview was not native to America.  American secular activists imported their founding ideas from Europe, from the centuries-long secular revolution that had already transformed the Old World.  In regard to higher education, our particular circumstance provided a conduit for European ideas.  America had very few graduate schools at the end of the 19th century, and so American college graduates who desired advanced degrees went to Europe, and in particular to Germany.

In Germany, American graduate students were immersed in the latest and most thorough version of European Enlightenment thought—“enlightenment” generally meaning, “having left behind the darkness of Christian superstition, for the light of science, reason, and endless human progress.”  In Europe, they studied Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, D. F. Strauss, Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and others, who either despised Christianity or radically reconstructed it according to secular purposes.  Awash with European intellectual life, which seemed manifestly superior to anything on their own shores, they returned to America, degree in hand, and ready to start a revolution.

But revolutionaries need money.  Prior to the 20th century, most American colleges were denominationally based, and hence denominationally funded.  Being tied to its particular Christian heritage, such an institution was an ill-fitted receptacle for the new wave of secular academics.  The answer to this dilemma was simply to start new universities from scratch or take over existing universities via generous endowments. These universities would be direct imitations of European universities.

This educational revolution was made possible, interestingly enough, by the enormous wealth of the most prominent American industrialists.  Some of these industrialists were quite eager to advance secular agendas.  But others, who were personally very religious, were in an important sense “duped.”  They were persuaded by secular activists that bankrolling these new secular universities was a worthy public goal, even while the activists remained silent about the underlying secular agenda.

Either way, new secular universities sprung up, financed by America’s most successful businessmen, and gained almost instant prestige: Johns Hopkins University started by Johns Hopkins, Cornell University by Ezra Cornell, the University of Chicago by John Rockefeller, Stanford University by Leland Stanford, Vanderbilt University by Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Duke University by James Duke, to name a few.

Starting from scratch with endowments beyond the wildest dreams of any denominational college meant that these new secular universities would dominate America’s intellectual landscape, for the most part eclipsing the denominational colleges, and providing a top-down secular, intellectual revolution.  Since these new universities had graduate schools, the next generation of Ph.D.’s would repeat, on American soil, the German experience of the first generation of expatriated intellectuals.

In addition to beginning new universities from scratch, money flowed into secular universities through educational funds.  In 1902, Rockefeller’s General Education Board was founded with unimaginably large assets of $46 million. Less than ten years later, the Carnegie Corporation was founded with even larger assets of $151 million.  This seemingly endless supply of money was poured into the coffers of new universities and existing institutions willing to model themselves on the German research institutions and German intellectual life.

Interestingly enough, as Smith notes, sometimes endowments were not just pro-secular, but anti-religious.  In 1905 Andrew Carnegie gave ten million dollars to establish a professor’s pension fund. But “all denominational colleges and universities were categorically excluded from the plan; only schools with no formal ties to religious denominations could participate” (75).  Mr. Carnegie’s carrot had just the secularizing effect he desired. Fifteen colleges immediately cut ties to their denominational sponsors, including the prestigious Wesleyan, Dickinson, Swarthmore, Brown, Bowdoin, and Rutgers.

And so, it is not the addled imagination of fading religious reactionaries who place the secular revolution in colleges and universities.  It is a matter of historical fact that, in great part, the new secular American universities were designed from the very beginning as centers of secularist intellectual and cultural revolution.

It is then, in one sense, quite accurate to locate the source of the 1960s cultural revolution in the universities, as many conservatives do.  But in another sense, it is inaccurate.  The college students of the 1960s did not start that revolution.  They were third generation revolutionaries.  It was their teachers’ teachers, who had been to Europe in the early 20th century who really firmly planted the secular revolution on our soil.

In upcoming emails of this series, we’ll explore both how the secular revolution occurred in education (focusing, in particular, on Christian Smith’s discipline, sociology), and some of the secular philosophers of Europe whose ideas were especially influential imports to our shore.

Sex Week at Yale aims to take the ho-hum out of sex ed.

Recently, at Yale University, some students attended a workshop featuring a sex therapist whose topic of discussion was sex in relationships. Other Yale students--perhaps those eager to get away from the standard lecture approach to class--learned to striptease with a former Playboy TV host.

Sound like an excerpt from The Howard Stern Show? In fact, these events were part of Sex Week at Yale, a series of activities (sponsored mainly by a company called Pure Romance) so risqué that pundits and educators alike have raised speculation about the validity of the educational value of the program.

Darwin popularizer and secular activist, Herbert Spencer,
viewed education in utilitarian terms

According to Christian Smith, Herbert Spencer was one of the most influential European thinkers for the first generation of Americans to go abroad for their graduate education. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was enamored with Darwinism, and attempted to apply evolutionary theory to anything and everything, including educational theory.

Spencer was the son of a Quaker teacher, William George Spencer, and as a boy was allowed to study whatever he fancied. As a result, he lacked the discipline to complete any later formal education himself, although he acquired enough mathematics to become an assistant schoolmaster at 17, and then to become a civil engineer for the Railroad. It was during this time that he began to take a serious interest in education, politics, and religion.

Released by the railway, Spencer returned home only to become active in politics, and was able to land a job as sub editor for the Economist. He soon published his first book, Social Statics (1850), which, interestingly enough, was influenced by Lamarckian evolutionary theory pre-dating Darwin. Darwin would publish his Origin of Species nine years later. Upon reading it, Spencer became so agitated with enthusiasm that he planned a multi-volume work that would apply Darwinism to each of the sciences. With each successive publication of the volumes, Spencer’s fame grew.

In regard to religion, Spencer took a position that he called Agnosticism, the belief that God—if he exists—is entirely unknowable. Of course, that meant that it would be quite ridiculous to have any religious education. Spencer was willing to admit that religion might be useful insofar as it was conducive to social harmony, but being useful is quite a different thing from being true. Hence, with a long line of secularists, stretching all the way back to Benedict Spinoza, Spencer reduced religion to mere moral utility.

And education? Since the basis of his approach to everything was evolutionary, Spencer believed that, since we are in a constant struggle in the survival of the fittest, both with others and with the environment, then education should be directed solely to what will help us in that struggle. For Spencer, that meant that education should be utilitarian and secularized, and hence focused for the most part on the sciences that help us conquer nature.

As Smith argues, the new breed of American professors who came back from European universities in the early part of the 1900s were certainly like Spencer in this regard: they denied the utility of the liberal arts, religious education that Protestant denominational colleges had for so long stressed. Against this “outdated” view, they tended to push a far more utilitarian, science-based curriculum that shared Spencer’s this worldly aims.
Benjamin Wiker

Searing review in the New York Times of Dennett's book Breaking the Spell evokes fiery retort from the author

"It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."

Leon Wieseltier

Dennett Reacts:

"So the only details in Wieseltier's long review that even purport to uncover mistakes in my book are fabrications. He was clutching at straws — and missing! Whatever could have inspired him to invent such gratuitous charges? In one of his many distortions of my views, he says: "If you disagree with Dennett, it is because you fear what he says." Actually, I recognize and discuss openly all sorts of disagreements that I do not attribute to fear, but he is right that I do often discern more anxiety than rationality in the responses to my arguments, and now I can provide yet another example of what I mean: the visceral repugnance that fairly haunts Wieseltier's railing (without arguments) against my arguments.

There is one passage that purports to be an argument, hoping to demonstrate that I contradict myself when I claim that the way our culture lets us transcend our genetic imperatives is a fact that is itself visible to, and explicable by, natural science. As an argument, it is a hopeless non sequitur, but it almost perfectly expresses the most debilitating confusion at the heart of the brand of humanism Wieseltier takes himself to be defending. "If it is a fact of biology, then we are not independent of biology," he says, betraying his hankering for a miraculous kind of independence, a skyhook that does not and cannot exist — a fantasy that is not needed to preserve the meaning in our lives.

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