The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, by George Marsden

George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship is an important, if imperfect, contribution to the debate about Christians in the academy. Marsden’s book addresses two audiences: on the one hand are secularists who suspect that explicitly Christian scholarship would be detrimental to the academy, and on the other are Christian scholars who are accustomed to suppressing their religious commitments. Beyond merely making the case that Christian scholarship should be done, Marsden also has the extraordinarily difficult task of offering concrete suggestions for what it should look like. The present review will focus on his appeal to the secular academy. Here his arguments are valid, but perhaps less conclusive than he is willing to admit.

In his effort to demonstrate that the academy should be open to Christian perspectives, Marsden identifies several weaknesses in the dominant modern and postmodern paradigms that he believes Christianity can help address. In the first place, he argues that the academy lacks consistent first principles. Although the majority of secular academics take certain moral principles for granted, especially when it comes to discrimination, they have no real philosophical basis for doing so. Christianity resolves this problem by grounding morality in an objective creator (3,28,86-8). Although Marsden is largely correct here, it is worth noting that utilitarian philosophers have provided a reasonably pragmatic grounding for ethics, even if an objective one remains lacking. The second weakness Marsden indentifies is the academy’s inability to address questions of meaning and significance. Christianity can fill this gap (28). Thirdly, Christianity avoids a reductionistic approach to human history and relationships that ignores humanity’s spiritual dimension (71-2). And finally, Christianity provides epistemological grounding by arguing that “if God created our minds…it makes sense to believe that God may communicate with us in nature as well as in Scripture” (88). Here Marsden is unfortunately mistaken; the epistemological ground he offers is based on common sense, and unfortunately common sense seems too often not to hold in the real world. Marsden’s almost casual deduction is no firmer epistemological ground than the typical realist assumption that there is at least a partial correspondence between our sensory perceptions and some kind of “real world”.

Although Marsden is not willing to accept moral relativism, he argues that the academy’s acceptance of moral and cultural relativism leaves it with no grounds for excluding Christian perspectives. The academy, he points out, is entirely open to perspectives based on social factors like gender, sexual orientation, and race. It even admits ideological perspectives like Marxism and neoconservatism. There is therefore no reason for religious perspectives to be excluded. Of course, Marsden is not unaware that objections could be raised to this argument, and immediately moves to dispatch them. In the first place, some have argued that it is offensive for Christians to argue that their views are better than everyone else’s. In Marsden’s opinion, this criticism is equally applicable to everyone, including relativists (10). Another objection holds that faith-informed scholarship violates the academy’s standards of detachment. But as Marsden points out, naturalism is no more neutral than supernaturalism. Naturalism is an Enlightenment assumption (74). Moreover, the concept of objectivity is largely passé in the academy except when it is resurrected as a weapon with which to bludgeon religious perspectives (26). (Still, Marsden does suggest that Christians should submit to “methodological secularism”, which means they should focus on natural phenomena available to all, while remaining open to their spiritual dimensions [91].) A third argument is that religion is a strictly non-empirical and private concern that has no place in the academy except as an object of study. Marsden rejoins that this is a trivialization of religion (20,22) and only true insofar as Christianity limits itself to unfalsifiable claims (25). The doctrine of incarnation, in fact, is thoroughly historical and empirical, and Marsden thinks it implies that God reveals himself through natural, empirical means (90-3). The question of whether “natural revelation” exists is of course an age-old bugbear, and Marsden opens himself to criticism here. But I personally agree with him, and am also very much in agreement that religion makes quite a few falsifiable claims that should not be removed from the purview of history and science. A fourth argument made by critics of Christian scholarship is that Evangelicals are notorious for being anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, culturally imperialist bigots. Marsden replies that this is not true of all Evangelicals; the Baptists, in fact, have historic ties to liberalism that help to balance their ties to “militant Christianity” (33-4). Christian morality, in fact, has been co-opted by politics, a problem that might have been avoided if Christians had engaged more regularly in critical self-reflection (81-2). While I agree with Marsden that the folly of extremists should not disqualify all Christians from the academy, I couldn’t help but start at Marsden’s assertion that “most of conservative American Christianity is not of such an extreme sort” (34). Has he lost touch with street-level Evangelicalism? I also doubt that the average Evangelical would feel that the anti-gay or anti-feminist agendas are co-options, given the biblical pronouncements against homosexual practice and female authority, speech, and hatlessness in church. Indeed, the militancy of much of conservative Christianity should give the academy real pause; they cannot be blamed if they carefully select which Christian scholars are allowed to the table. The fifth argument Marsden answers is premised on the American principle of separation of church and state. Marsden argues that this principle has been taken much too far; Jefferson’s passing reference to a “wall of separation” has become canon, and the attempts of so-called “creation scientists” to impose insane curricula in Arkansas have only aggravated the situation (37,39-40). Ultimately, Marsden says, the disestablishment clause must be held in balance with freedom of speech and free exercise of religion (38,42). A sixth and final objection to Christian scholarship is that it is tendentious and irrational. To this Marsden replies that there are approaches to religion that are rational and coherent, and that religious perspectives should only be allowed insofar as they are willing to play by the rules of the liberal academy (45,50,108). Christian perspectives will not affect empirical analyses; the Christian commitment to honesty ensures that only larger interpretive frameworks will exhibit religious influence (61-3). Here again I think that Marsden overstates his case. Christian scholarship unfortunately has not always been as honest or careful as is Marsden, and in many cases their empirical analyses are affected. I can certainly see why creation science and attempts to harmonize the Bible and dismiss the findings of biblical criticism might appear tendentious and irrational to the secular academy. Here again the academy may need to be careful in selecting the Christian scholars that are to be admitted to the discussion.