ANTISEPTIC EDUCATION: THE MYTH OF IRRELIGIOSITY + AL HIEBERT + Professor of Philosophy and Theology Providence College + DENNIS HIEBERT + Associate Professor of Sociology Providence College It is no longer news that pluralism, relativism, individualism, and the separation of church and state have become foundational values in North American culture.1 One consequence is that the majority of legislators, the judiciary, and educators have concluded that public education ought to be, at least explicitly, religiously neutral. However, some social commentators suggest that the implicit public agenda actually goes beyond religious impartiality, that it is in essence an anti-religious agenda, and that neutrality is a thin veil for negativity. Freedom from religion, not freedom of religion, is said to be part of the hidden curriculum of public education. Whereas religion was once taught authoritatively in public schools, it is now overtly patronized as an optional and harmless personal preference. But covertly, it is often treated as a contaminant that must be flushed from the system. The infectious agency of religious faith is thereby redefined as pathogenic. But is non-religious education, or even religiously neutral education, really possible? Can teachers and writers of educational materials fulfill their mandate 1 without influencing or infecting their students and readers in some aspect of religious belief and behavior? Note that the question here is not "should," but "can." The question here is not the relative pedagogical merits of advocacy versus neutrality as contrasting means to facilitate belief reassessment in the classroom.2 Rather, the question here is the very possibility of the banishment in toto of religion from formal education. And like the oft-admitted impossibility of objectivity,3 irreligious public education is here found to be mythical, both in the sense of its widely held, formative belief, and in the sense of its falsehood. The crux of this issue turns on the definition of both education and religion. The Nature of Education In a recent discussion with a group of university students from several faculties, including several students of education, it was concluded that education occurs when someone is being influenced. Influence, like influenza, is infectious, and is more easily caught than taught. It is transmitted during the acquisition of the knowledge of "facts," in the interpretation of the meaning of those facts, and in the development of attitudes, values, and skills in any area of human endeavor. Education involves learning, but learning is by no means exclusive to educational activities and contexts. Learning can occur directly from the non-human realm without the mediation of educators, as in direct observation of the physical world, 2 or through independent personal reflection and introspection. Indeed "learning is a process, frequently informal and unorganized, through which a person acquires knowledge, (whereas) education refers to the transmission of knowledge, skills, and values through formally organized and structured learning processes."4 Learning may go unnoticed, even by the learner, whereas performance in education is usually formally evaluated and recorded. In the aspects of sense experience and thought processes, it is readily assumed possible to learn without implicating religious dynamics; it is plausible that, at least in some areas of learning, the educational process can occur apart from religious influence. Education trades in knowledge derived from various sources.5 The authoritarian approach is one mode, in which knowledge is derived from those who are socially or politically defined as qualified producers of knowledge. The rationalistic approach is a second mode, in which knowledge is acquired by strict adherence to the forms and rules of logic, to that which is "true in principle." The scientific approach is a third mode, in which knowledge is built upon the twin pillars of reason and logic on one side, and observation and experience on the other. Science is also uniquely consensual, having substituted the principle of intersubjectivity for the objectivity that remains so elusive. In this regard, it is noteworthy that most of the knowledge acquired through education is by means of 3 agreement, and not by personal, rational thought, nor by personal experience and observation. The fourth mode of knowing is more conventionally associated with religion, and is anathema to modern public education. In the mystical mode of knowing, knowledge is obtained from supernatural authorities. Now, if the Kantian distinction between fact and value is accepted, it is presumably possible to teach students the accounts of the Battle of Waterloo (natural authority), the intricacies of the Pythagorean Theorem (rationality), or the principles of the reflection and refraction of light (science) without recourse to mystical modes of knowing. If an educator honestly attempts to be dispassionate, it would seem possible to teach a full course or write a whole text in history, mathematics, or physics without broaching religious issues. However, several realities expose the naiveté of such presumption. One is that religion is not limited to supernatural pronouncements. Another is that value-free facts do not exist in human experience.6 A third is that formal education inevitably entails more than the accumulation of brute, disjointed "facts." Prevailing wisdom argues that, given our pluralist culture, a religiously neutral, or preferably irreligious public education is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary to ensure an open, tolerant, and democratic society in the next generation, one that will be characterized by peace and harmony. But are these 4 assumptions about the possibility, prerequisites, and products of public education warranted? The title of Bloom's influential critique of higher education, The Closing of the American Mind, plays on the irony of such popular sentiment. His lament is that The danger [students] have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. . . . Openness . . . is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. . . . The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. . . . The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue-openness.7 That education inculcates virtue in addition to knowledge is no real revelation either; it is often the stated intent. The distinction does, however, alert us to the difference between what formal education may say it is, and what it does, the latter being what sociologists term the functions of education. Manifest functions of education are conscious and intended, and include the transmission of culture, social and political integration, occupational selection and allocation, and personal development.8 Latent functions are unconscious and unintended, and vary from the shallow provision of day care to the profound provision of meaning systems. This latter, subtle element of public education has been explored through two concepts of the so-called "new sociology of education," cultural 5 reproduction and the hidden curriculum.9 Given such insinuations, how effectively can public education neutralize or eradicate religion? Lest a hasty and premature conclusion be drawn, the concept of religion must be explored further. The Nature of Religion To begin with plebeian conceptions of religion, Webster's New World Dictionary10 articulates the popular definition of religion as: "1. belief in and worship of God or gods; 2. a specific system of belief or worship, etc. built around God, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, etc." Now, if the essence of religion is indeed some "belief in and worship of God or gods," then learning, even formal education, is possible without reference to such beliefs and practice. This is what modern pluralists demand of public education. Therefore they insist that teachers in public elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions who are Christians, Jews, Muslims, or adherents of other traditional religions must be vigilant in keeping their educational influence over students religiously sterile. But is this possible? Is this a full or even an adequate understanding of the religious realm? Or is this discriminatory toward certain traditional kind of religion.11 Definitions of religion that focus on "belief in and worship of God or gods" are easily exposed as expressions of 6 historically and culturally bound western ethnocentrism. Western religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam do consist of "belief in and worship of God," and animists also "believe in and worship" many gods. But there is no notion of "God or gods" in Hinayana Buddhism, Janism, Confucianism, Shinto and a variety of other systems of belief and behavior which are universally recognized as religions. Indeed, even the natural-supernatural dichotomy is merely a product of Western thinking. Hence, any ideal that educators working in public institutions can avoid advocating religiously grounded perspectives on issues by eschewing concepts of God is based on a deficient concept of religion. How then should religion be defined in order to address most comprehensively the issue of religious influence in education? Academic definitions offer more breadth. In his Types of Religious Philosophy, Burtt defines the "essence of religion" as "the integration of personality around devotion to a supreme ideal" and then, citing Dewey, adds that whatever performs this function for an individual is religious for that individual.12 Theologian-philosopher Tillich defined a person's religion as whatever for that person was a focus of "ultimate concern."13 Missiologist Bonk defines religion as "man's response to what for him are the ultimate issues or questions of life."14 Social science routinely classifies definitions of religion as either substantive or functional. Substantive 7 definitions define religion in terms of what it is, and attempt to identify its "substance" or "essence." Leading contemporary proponents such as Stark and Bainbridge "are prepared to assert that there can be no wholly naturalistic religion; that a religion lacking supernatural assumptions is no religion at all."15 This would appear to be type of definition employed by those who seek to "cleanse" public education of mystical modes of knowing, or even of the acknowledgment of a supernatural realm. At the same time, substantive definitions of religion have allowed several forms of Hinduism, such as Transcendental Meditation and New Age teaching, to enter institutions of public education because they are not recognized as religious. The same is true of several forms of Buddhism such as yoga and the various martial arts. But does the absence of reference to God or gods, as that in major western religions, make these schools of thought and practice any less religious? An increasing majority of scholars are now employing more inclusive, functional definitions of religion that, like the functional approach to education, define it in terms of what it does. Many of the most prominent sociologists of the twentieth century have considered consequences, not contents, to be the defining criteria of religion. Durkheim's notion of the sacred and the profane, Bellah's notion of civil religion, and Luckmann's notion of invisible religion all derive from functional definitions.16 Anthropologist Geertz's oft-cited definition is 8 representative. It focuses on how meanings are stored in and communicated through symbols such as objects, behaviors, and myths or stories. Religious symbols are macrosymbolic in that they interpret the meaning of life through a cosmology or worldview. Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.17 In his commentary on Geertz's definition of religion, particularly its "formulating conceptions of a general order of existence," sociologist Roberts notes that "A distinguishing characteristic of religion is that it provides a worldview a cognitive ordering of concepts of nature, of self, of society, of the supernatural."18 Even Webster's hints at this essential attribute of what makes a belief system "religious" when in its crude definition it includes a reference to a "philosophy of life." The religious function of providing meaning for human experience has been a major theme in the analysis of religion since the seminal writing of Weber.19 Meaning refers to ordinary, everyday interpretations of situations and events in terms of some broader frame of reference.20 As such, meaning is not inherent in situations; it is 9 bestowed. Attaching meaning to events is a human process.21 When the broader frame of reference is a comprehensive meaning system, it locates all human experience in a single, general, explanatory arrangement. For example, Weber elaborated the concept of theodicies, the religious explanations that provide meaning for meaning-threatening experiences such as death, suffering, pain, and injustice. Yinger's functional definition asserts that religion is any "system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with these ultimate problems of human life."22 Circumventing for the moment the debate about whether religion is necessarily social or whether it can be individual, functional definitions of religion consistently assume that any comprehensive meaning system is fundamentally religious, regardless of content. Though many people appear to be comfortable with highly incoherent assortments of beliefs and practices,23 Yinger concludes that, in the sense of meaning, all people are religious, and that "human nature abhors a vacuum in systems of faith." Secularists, by definition, reject the charge that they are religious in their own way, while nevertheless holding to their own views of the purpose of life and the meaning of death, suffering, pain and injustice. Even if they are nihilistic, or if the conviction and commitment with which they hold their views might be relatively low, the views they thus express are nonetheless, in functional terms, religious views. The same is true of worldviews such as all 10 varieties of humanism, existentialism, and Marxism, whether their views of the supernatural are atheistic, agnostic, or skeptic. Today's secular humanists cringe at their own repeated description of their worldview as "religious humanism" in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto I. Even though the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II speaks only of "secular humanism," the current denial of religiosity makes this worldview no less religious. McDowell and Stewart have further exposed the religious nature of such worldviews in Understanding Secular Religions.24 To the extent, then, that teachers and writers project themselves and their view on these and other ultimate issues of life, they cannot avoid being involved in the religious education of their audience. Except possibly in very narrow episodes of simple "factual" transference of information, such as conveying the accounts of the Battle of Waterloo, the intricacies of the Pythagorean Theorem, or the principles of the refraction of light, educators cannot avoid injecting their message with existential meaning. And especially whenever teachers or writers make any suggestions concerning a wider interpretive context to historical, rational, or empirical "facts," they invariably spread the contagion of religion. The Correlates of Religion in Education Several concepts already encountered brush up against, overlap with, and occasionally substitute for religion in the process of education. Some of these correlates are more 11 readily admitted by secularists than others. All have more in common with functional definitions of religion than with substantive definitions. All are more frequently learned in social contexts such as formal education than are generated by individuals in the privacy of their psyche. The first correlate of religion is ideology. In his erudite analysis of education based upon the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School of thought, Giroux defines ideology as the production, consumption, and representation of ideas and behavior, which can either distort or illuminate the nature of reality. As a set of meanings and ideas, ideologies can be either coherent or contradictory; they can function within the spheres of both consciousness and unconsciousness. . . . the characteristic feature of ideology is its location in the category of meaning and thought production.25 Giroux's analysis politicizes the notion of knowledge. Like all critical analyses of social phenomena, it leaves no allowance for the absence of ideology; education always carries some shade or combination of the classic trilogy of ideologies.26 Conservative education engages in cultural reproduction by legitimating the dominant order. Liberal education engages in cultural production by encouraging the mediation or "reading" of meaning by human agents. Radical education engages in cultural reconstruction through critical appropriation and transformation. Traditional, 12 institutional religion has been most associated with conservative education, although modernity has prompted religious education of the liberal stripe. One measure of modernity is that the minority status of traditional religion now relegates it to the radical ideology once practiced by secularists. If Jesus of Nazareth were to walk onto any contemporary secular university campus and proclaim his gospel as truth, his message would again be radically countercultural. Worldviews are a second correlate of religion. Berger and Luckmann's classic sociology of knowledge equated worldviews with comprehensive meaning systems.27 Within Christian scholarship, Sire's definition is authoritative: A worldview is a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic make-up of our world. . . . [It is the] essential, rock-bottom answers to the following questions: (1) What is prime reality-the really real? (2) What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us? (3) What is a human being? (4) What happens to a person at death? (5) Why is it possible to know anything at all? (6) How do we know what is right and wrong? (7) What is the meaning of human history?28 As Walsh elaborates, worldviews are not only a storied vision of life that provide a perspective through which to 13 make sense out of it, they are also a vision for life that entail an orientation toward action, a call to praxis.29 The distinction between worldviews and religions is therefore only slight. In Luckmann's appraisal, "The worldview, as an 'objective' and historical social reality, performs an essentially religious function and [we may] define it as an elementary form of religion. This social form is universal in human society."30 As noted earlier, Roberts considers a worldview as a "distinguishing characteristic" of religion, and depicts it as one component at the heart of religion in a diagram of the elements of religion.31 Faith is a third correlate of religion. Whereas religion has been understood from Durkheim on as a social phenomenon, faith has been understood as an individual phenomenon. Fowler, formulator of the most sophisticated stage theory of faith development,32 invokes Becker's33 term of homo poeta-man the meaning-maker-in claiming faith to be a human universal. In Fowler's conception, faith is, firstly, a triadic relationship between a self, some other, and a supraordinate center of value and power. The self is bound to the other by shared trust and loyalty, and bound in the context of a supraordinate center of value and power; we "keep faith" with others in the context of value commitments. Faith is also, secondly, a mode of constitutive knowing "that composes or establishes both the known and the knower in relation to the known."34 In this 14 mode of knowing, the "logic of rational certainty" is sublated by the "logic of conviction." Faith is not always religious in the cultural or institutional sense; it is at once deeper and more personal than the cumulative traditions of religion, though the two are reciprocal, and, as Smith says wistfully, "Faith was meant to be religious."35 As one of several illustrations, Fowler discusses the faith structure of universities, in which relationships of trust and loyalty are centered in the values of free inquiry and commitment to truth, and are based on certain modes of knowing. Likewise, Parks, in her study of higher education, concluded that "every professor is potentially a spiritual guide and every syllabus a confession of faith."36 As summary, Fowler insists that "Faith, rather than belief or religion, is the most fundamental category in the human quest for relation to transcendence."37 Even taken together, ideology, worldview, and faith may not, by definition, constitute religion. But each, on its own, is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for religion. And it can hardly be disputed that all three coexist and are operative in the classroom. Therefore, teachers and textbooks at every educational level and in every subject area who are carriers of ideology, who expose others to alternate word views, and who communicate a life of faith are, in effect or function, engaging in religious education-protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. 15 The Ubiquity of Religion The myth of objectivity and neutrality, spurred by Weber's turn-of-the-century dictum that teachers should suppress their values in the classroom and that science should be value-free,38 has deluded educators for much of this century. But by mid-century, Butterick observed that: "One of the sorriest assumptions of secular education is that it makes no assumptions."39 And by this last decade of the century, appraisals such as the one offered earlier by philosopher Trueblood are being reprinted as accepted dogma. The claim that scholars can be impartial or neutral in anything of human importance is now an outmoded idea. Man finds himself inevitably in the value-centric predicament, because the very rejection of value judgments is itself a value judgment. The position of the thinker who is wholly clear of assumptions is one which is neither desirable nor possible. What is important, in intellectual honesty, is that basic assumptions or perspectives should be understood, admitted, and cogently defended.40 Trueblood notes further that students are inevitably under the influence of the minds of their professors, and therefore "have a right to know what the positions are which professors take on major issues, including the basic presuppositions with which they begin."41 Ironically Weber's own friend and colleague, Troeltsch, had already in their day rejected Enlightenment notions of 16 the distinction between fact and value, the radical separation of subject and object, and the supposed detachment of "ought" from "is," and had recognized the ethical engagement of scientific scholarship.42 The record of the twentieth century suggests that Troeltsch's perspective has come from behind to win the debate. That the presence of values in both science and education is unavoidable is now virtually unchallenged. The literature on values in education has become vast, and their presence constitutes a fourth correlate of religion perhaps more imposing than the three discussed above. Humanist scientists like Baum are now encouraging their own colleagues, in admonitions that resonate with Trueblood's to admit the value-orientation of their craft. Since social science inevitably operates out of certain ethical presuppositions, it would be scientifically more appropriate if [scientists] laid their cards on the table, revealed their ethical vision of society, and defended their option with rational arguments.43 Value-orientation, and even value-commitment, in secular science is increasingly being more than admitted; it is being advocated.44 A 1986 conference at a major Canadian public university on the Basic Principles for Social Science in Our Time was organized around moral engagement as one of its three cardinal principles. Westhues, the conference chair, wrote that a worthy practise of social science requires . . . more 17 than a relativistic stance. The principle offered here is to become morally engaged, to cultivate not just knowledge but wisdom, not only awareness of alternatives but judgement as to which of them is best here and now. . . .The moral engagement requested here is nothing less than your . . . formulation and propagation of a reasoned, provisional, open-ended vision of the public good.45 In response, many academic disciplines now do understand, admit, and defend their assumptions and engagements. The redefinition of objectivity as intersubjectivity is one example. The frequent explication of the naturalism of science in methodological textbooks is another. Nachmias and Nachmias, as illustration, set forth the "unproved and unprovable" assumptions that they claim are necessary prerequisites for the conduct of scientific discourse. They are that 1) nature is orderly, 2) we can know nature, 3) knowledge is superior to ignorance, 4) all natural phenomena have natural causes, 5) nothing is self-evident, and 6) knowledge is derived from the acquisition of experience.46 That Christians may vigorously debate these assumptions47 does not detract from the virtue of their forthcoming honesty. A third example of improving scientific integrity is the social scientific understanding of causality. With their own theological debates about free will and determinism still in process, it is at best uninformed and 18 at worst unseemly for Christians to deprecate social science as being hopelessly deterministic. Granted, social science was, in truth, built upon hopes of replicating the cause-and-effect determinism of natural science, Comte and Durkheim being two primary architects of a dehumanizing positivism. But, following another lead of Weber, much of sociology in particular has extracted itself from iron-clad determinism by constructing a probabilistic model of causality.48 As Babbie explains, "The nomothetic model of explanation involves the isolation of those relatively few considerations that will provide a partial explanation for the behaviour of many people" (emphasis in original).49 In other words, free will remains. Christians set a poor standard for fairness when they castigate science based upon extreme or variant cases of hyperbole, such as circular, ex post facto claims of "scientific proof" for a purely materialistic, naturalistic worldview. Claims such as these merely demonstrate that the mainstream community of science is burdened with its own embarrassments, and Christians ought to do unto others in this regard also as they would have done unto themselves. It is not only the illogical, fanatical fringe of scientism that is religious, just as it is not only the heretical fringe of Christianity that is religious. Neither should be measured by their marginals. But even mainstream science becomes religious when faith, as discussed above, is placed exclusively in its worldview and 19 resultant assumptions. For example, the assumption of science noted above, that "all natural phenomena have natural causes," may be self-evidently true as a tautology. However, the all too readily inferred corollary, that all events occurring in our universe are natural phenomena with natural causes, is not. Naturalism remains "unproved and unprovable." And to assert naturalism as metaphysical reality is what Burtt described as the religion of science,50 though such an assertion is by no means made by all scientists themselves. Christian scientists routinely adopt naturalistic assumptions as working hypotheses without embracing them as metaphysical beliefs. And for many of them, as for many general adherents of science, to cast the interface of science and religion as inter-religious dialogue is to strain the boundaries of credulity. In the final analysis, the definition of religion would appear to be no facile matter. Nor is it trivial. If the ramifications of definition were limited to academic debates, to the theorizing of philosophy and the selection of research problems and methodology of social science, the discrepancies and ambiguities of the conceptual impasse would be more tolerable. But the issue contains literal life and death consequences, the religiosity of education being one of the less critical but no less crucial scenarios. Many other political and judicial decisions are based upon some meaning of "religion." 20 Perhaps the most fascinating question, if not the most sociological, is why interest groups adopt one type of definition of religion or the other. If academics cannot establish the truth value or accuracy of substantive definitions of religion in contrast with functional definitions, then, as McGuire notes, choice of definition becomes a matter of strategy.51 Definition becomes a political choice. In this light, why then do the majority of current legislators, the judiciary, and educators insist on substantive definitions of religion? And why do the majority of current religious educators insist on functional definitions of religion? Has this always been the case? Why do the religiously committed now want to paint secularists with the same brush that has colored them? What does this tell us about religion, about society, and about ourselves? It is not as if secularists have no life in them; they nurture an insidious life form that no Christian can afford to misdiagnose or underestimate. The life inherent in religion, and particularly the true life inherent in Christianity, remains as contrary to secularism as opposing blood types; one's antibody is another's antigen. In attempting to wash public education of religion, secularists are simply striving to quarantine that which they recognize as contagious, define as contamination, and experience as disease. The religiously committed do the same. No education is lifeless, no education is antiseptic. The myth 21 of irreligious education is only one antibody produced by one life form in the only real struggle on earth, the struggle to determine which life prevails. The spiritual vitality of those who claim the blood of Jesus will be more decisive in this struggle than their relative political advantage. Notes and References 1For a representative social analysis of and commentary on Canada, see Reginald W. Bibby, Mosaic Madness: The Poverty and Potential of Life in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co;, 1990). For the United States see Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985). 2This journal has maintained a dialogue on this issue. See Stanley Hauerwas, "How Christian Universities Contribute to the Corruption of Youth: Church and University in a Confused Age." Faculty Dialogue 6 (Spring-Summer, 1986), David Basinger and Randall Basinger, "Neutrality in the Classroom: A Defense." Faculty Dialogue 12 (Fall, 1989), pp. 79-91, and David Lee Parkyn, "Advocacy in the College Classroom." Faculty Dialogue 14 (Spring, 1991), pp. 155-67. 3For example, see Richard Perkins, "The Place of Ideology in Christian Liberal Arts: Why We Need More 'Ought' and Less 'Is'." Faculty Dialogue 7 (Fall-Winter, 22 1986-87) pp. 53-70. 4Sid N. Gilbert and Ian M. Gomme, "Education in the Canadial Mosaic," in M. Michael Rosenberg et al. eds., An Introduction to Sociology, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Methuen Publications, 1987), p. 199. 5This discussion of the modes of knowing is adapted from David Nachmias and Chava Nachmias, Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 4-10. 6Discussions of this impossibility commonly appear in secular textbooks on the philosophy of social science, such as Roger Trigg, Understanding Social Science: A Philosophical Introduction to the Social Sciences (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 7Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 25-6. 8Gilbert and Gomme, An Introduction to Sociology, p. 218. 9For cursory definitions of these concepts, see Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, Dictionary of Sociology, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1988). 10David B. Guralnik, ed., (New York: Warner Books, 1984), p. 505. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (New York: Warner Books, 1984), p. 505. 11The respected evangelical historian, George Marsden, has spoken of the discrimination experienced by conservative 23 Christians in public universities. The eminent Princeton sociologist, Robert Wuthnow, has spoken of the disdain with which they are held. See George M. Marsden, "Mum's the Word in College: Thoughts on the Silencing of Christian Professors," and Robert Wuthnow, "Tour of the Believer's Underground," In Trust (New Year, 1991), pp. 10-15. 12Edwin A. Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, Rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1951), p. 333. 13Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957, p. 1. 14Jon Bonk, private conversation, January 15, 1991. 15Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 3. The theory of religion as compensation propounded here is one of the most noteworthy in recent scholarship. 16Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), and Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 17Note also his extended discussion in Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in Michael Banton, ed. Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 1-46. 24 18Keith A. Roberts, Religion in Social Perspective, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1990), p. 10. 19Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 20Meredith B. McGuire, Religion: The Social Context, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1987), p. 23. 21Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967). 22Milton Yinger, "A Comparative Study of the Substructure of Religion." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (March, 1977), pp. 67-86. 23Reginald W. Bibby, "Searching for the Invisible Thread: Meaning Systems in Contemporary Canada." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (22, 2, 1983) pp. 101-19. 24Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Understanding Secular Religions (San Bernadino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1982). 25Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1983), p. 143. 26Graham C. Kinloch, Ideology and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981). 27Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social 25 Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1966). 28James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalog, 2nd ed. (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 17-8. 29Brian J. Walsh, "Who Turned Out the Lights? The Light of The Gospel in a Post-Enlightenment Culture," Faculty Dialogue 13 (Winter, 1990), pp. 43-61. 30Luckmann, The Invisible Religion, p. 53. 31Roberts, Religion in Social Perspective, p. 93. 32James W. Fowler's theory is fully elaborated in his Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), and summarized in the first chapter of Craig Dykstra and Sharon Parks, eds., Faith Development and Fowler (Birmingham: Religious Education Press, 1986). 33Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 34Dykstra and Parks, Faith Development and Fowler, p. 21. 35Fowler adopts this definition of religion, in distinction with his concept of faith, from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 36Sharon Parks, The Critical Years: The Young Adult Search for a Faith to Live By (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), p;. 134. 26 37Fowler, Stages of Faith, p. 14. 38Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Edward Shils and Henry Finch, eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1903-1917 [1949]) 39George A. Butterick, Christ and Man's Dilemma (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1946), p. 138. 40D. Elton Trueblood, "The Concept of a Christian College," Faculty Dialogue 14 (Spring, 1991), p. 27. 41Trueblood, "The Concept of a Christian College," p. 28. 42Gregory Baum, "Science and Commitment: Historical Truth According to Ernest Troeltsch," The Social Imperative (New York: Paulist Press, 1979). 43Gregory Baum, "Humanist Sociology: Scientific and Critical," in Kenneth Westues, ed., Basic Principles for Social Science in Our Times (Waterloo, ON: University of St. Jerome's College Press, 1987), p. 87. 44Of course, Christian scientists have always advocated value commitment more readily, but the persuasiveness with which they are doing so is also increasing. For example, see Michael R. Leming, Raymond G. DeVries, and Brendan J. Furnish, eds. The Sociological Perspective: A Value-Committed Introduction (Grand Rapids: MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1989). 45Kenneth Westhues, "Context and Introduction: The Social Fact," in Kenneth Westhues, ed., Basic Principles for Social Science in Our Times (Waterloo, ON: University of St. 27 Jerome's College Press, 1987, pp. 21-3. 46Nachmias and Nachmias, Research Methods in the Social Sciences, pp. 6-9. 47S.D. Gaede provides an extended Christian critique of the naturalism of social science in Where Gods May Dwell: On Understanding the Human Condition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1985). 48C. Stephen Evans appeals to the probabilistic understanding of causality in his Christian rejection of sociological determinism in "Must Sociology Presuppose Determinism?" in Michael R. Leming, Raymond G. DeVries, and Brendan J. Furnish, eds., The Sociological Perspective: A Value-Committed Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1989). 49Earl Babbie, The Practise of Social Research, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1948). p. 62. 50Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, p. 168-196. 51McGuire, Religion: The Social Context, p. 6. 28