Frederick Houk Borsch (1935–2017)

reviewed in B&C 9-10/13 by PC Kemeny

...Frederick Houk Borsch's Keeping Faith at Princeton examines how religious beliefs have influenced Princeton University and, through it, American culture.

Drawing upon the typology George Marsden offered in The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-Belief (1994), Borsch notes that colleges took one of two paths in regard to religion. Some pursued the "Jeffersonian" model of nonsectarianism. While allowing religious groups to propagate their own distinctive beliefs, colleges, like the federal government, remained neutral about religion. In this way, the college, like the state, served as a place where members of different sects learned to live harmoniously in a diverse culture. The establishmentarian model, by contrast, promoted a particular version of Protestant orthodoxy at colleges through both the curriculum and extracurricular activities. As Borsch reminds us, Princeton, while founded by champions of Protestant orthodoxy, moved gradually toward the Jeffersonian model.

By the 1960s, the prevailing liberal Protestant ethos of the university seemed to be just as sectarian as evangelicalism had been in the early 20th century.

This transition from a predominantly Protestant to a more pluralistic position was not unique to Princeton. Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Southern California all followed a pattern similar to that of Princeton.

For Borsch, Princeton provides a model for the nation (just as Woodrow Wilson had wanted).

Evangelical groups, like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, have had two generations of experience working outside the halls of academic power. The campus ministries of mainline denominations now find themselves at the same place and are learning to adjust to their new status on campus. Perhaps the marginalized position that Christians of all theological persuasions now find themselves in provides the Christian community with a new opportunity to exercise the kind of "faithful presence" that James Davison Hunter advocates in To Change the World.

till, one might ask if religiously informed perspectives that meet the criteria of first-rate scholarship and serve the good of the university might not be able to find a constructive place in the classrooms of a secular university committed to diversity and pluralism.

Wheaton College, Valparaiso University, and the University of Dayton, for instance, represent distinctive ways that lively Christian traditions in our post-Protestant culture seek to make the faith relevant to the larger civic mission of higher education.… (more)