Princeton isn’t a place conducive to mediocrity, and this is true of religion as much as academics. When I arrived there four years ago, I gradually realized that I was confronted with a stark choice: the comfortable Catholicism of my youth—Mass on Sundays and grace before meals—was not going to cut it. Either I would give up the pretense of anything more than nominal Christianity and give in to the pressures of the mainstream culture, or I would try to make the creeds I learned in Sunday School become part of me and animate my daily life. Providentially, I chose the latter.

Over four years I became good friends with many others who had come to the same realization and made the same choice as I had. It was perhaps fitting, then, that the controversy that swelled in the days leading up to my graduation was a consequence of that choice. The controversy, which Ramesh Ponnuru detailed in a previous tothesource email, centered around anti-Catholic art work sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton’s public and international affairs institute. When several Catholic friends and I noticed the prominent public exhibit, we protested to the Wilson School’s dean. As Catholics, we didn’t claim a right to be immune from criticism or to have a right not to be offended. Rather, we simply asked for the equal respect and treatment from the University that many others received. Muslims, African-Americans, or homosexuals, for that matter, wouldn’t be subjected to University-sponsored bigotry, so why should Catholic Christians?

After weeks of stonewalling from the administration, the initial student complaint grew to involve the University chaplain, Catholic professors, and many sympathetic Protestants and Jews. I co-authored a letter describing the situation to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights with an Evangelical graduate student and the president of the Center for Jewish Life. National Review Online and Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint eventually picked up the story.

On the day before commencement exercises, I got a call from the Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” to appear as a guest on the show. Despite all the negative publicity from having Princeton’s clear double standard exposed in print and on TV, the University never removed the art display or acknowledged any unfairness. After graduation I reflected on the series of events that landed me on national television in front of millions of viewers and on what we could learn about engaging mainstream culture. A correct historical perspective and a disposition to seek truth wherever it lies, I concluded, were essential.

Looking back at Princeton’s history, many succumb to a familiar fallacy. Since secularization did accompany Princeton’s growth from a backwoods seminary into a world-class research university, then they think that rigorous scholarship and scientific progress must entail secularization. According to this flawed version of the story, secularization is just part of what progress and the pursuit of knowledge mean. Many believers have unwittingly helped to perpetuate this misreading of history by responding to contemporary culture in one of two ways.

The first response, characteristic of many Evangelical Protestants, is to reject the intellectual life and to fall back into fideism—an unthinking faith that believes truths of revelation can contradict truths of reason. The second, characteristic of many Catholics, is to reject modern culture as altogether decadent and to endorse a nostalgic traditionalism, pining for the good old days of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. The first response forgets Christ’s injunction to love God with all your mind, not just your heart. The second response ignores the real achievements of the modern world and forgets that in many ways the good old days weren’t so good. St. Thomas and Aristotle don’t have all the answers (the former was keen on burning heretics and the latter on slavery).

We need to avoid both fideism and nostalgia by acknowledging the complementary roles for faith and reason and balancing a reverence for tradition with an eye for authentic development. How exactly we can put these convictions into practice is admittedly difficult. It cannot be worked out prior to confronting particular questions, but such a task begins at least with recognizing that neither faith nor reason, past or present, has an exclusive claim upon the truth.

One unintended but happy consequence of a secular liberal culture is the newfound ecumenism between orthodox believers of different stripes. The stark challenge of secular liberalism on campus has forced traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish students to realize that their differences, while significant, are much smaller in comparison to the contrasts they both share with mainstream culture. This realization has, for instance, prompted Catholics to begin rediscovering the necessity of a personal knowledge of Scripture, and made Evangelicals begin to rediscover the place of tradition and the intellectual life in Christian heritage. At Princeton, the student leaders at the Aquinas Institute (the Catholic chaplaincy) and the several Evangelical fellowships often are close friends. Protestants from Agape Christian Fellowship will often attend Mass and Catholics will go to Agape’s prayer meetings.

Attending an elite school mired in the tired ideology of freedom misunderstood as license can be debilitating. For many students the experience no doubt weakens rather than strengthens their faith, and the current state of academia is far from an ideal idea of the university. Nonetheless, at Princeton the mix seems to be working in ways we might not expect. A group of young committed believers—ecumenical, intellectually serious, and outwardly oriented—have begun to challenge the negative bias toward relegious orthodoxy in elite secular culture.

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