Center for Faculty Development

Marsden analyzes the relationship between the secular educational establishment and Protestantism in his earlier book The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-Belief. (1994)   The evangelical roots of the American University slowly evolved into a thoroughly secular system, openly hostile to most forms of orthodox Christianity. The great secular Universities all had Christian origins; and although there are groups of Christians within the ivy halls, Christianity remains a retrograde religion of Blood and Book which seems unfit for  most secularist intellectual company. 

In the Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship , Marsden presents a more argumentative critique of the secular establishment’s prejudice against Christianity, and proposes that secularism live up to its own multicultural beliefs.  If variation and diversity can be accepted in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and critical methologies—why can’t Christianity be accepted as an alternative worldview?  His argument is persuasive—even if his hope is overly optimistic.

Marsden is not arguing like some pop-culture talk-show crank lamenting the downfall of western civilization. He is reasoning like a sober scholar, politely requesting admission to the forum of ideas. The Christian Tradition is not alien to the secularist, but forms part of his historical roots.  The secularist is acting both unhistorically, and inconsistently,   when Christianity is eliminated from the discussion of ideas.  If subjectivity, relativism,  and post-modern subjectivity are readily accepted as grounds from which to develop philosophic systems;  then certainly the development of Catholic and Reformed worldviews based on an objective moral and created order should be allowed to have their time at the podium of the modern Areopagus.   

The text examines the dominant suppression of secularism as a form of intellectual imperialism.  Though it is true that much fundamentalism suffers from the Anti-intellectual know-nothing tradition of American populism; there has also been a great resurgence of Catholic,  Orthodox and Evangelical scholarship.  Modern secularism in politics and academia until recently have consistently excluded from the microphone even a hearing for those who profess faith.  The tools of exclusion include various methods of politically correct suppression:  multiculturalism, paradoxically, as an exclusionary ideology, tolerance of all ideologies accept those that posit absolutes, the acceptance of diversity as a shibboleth to repress Western values, the use of gender, race, and class analysis to sideline Christian Western civilization, speech codes to censor Christian and conservative thought, and the separation of church and state as a means of keeping Christians out of every public square possible.  Naturalism is god; supernaturalism’s God is outlawed.

Marsden warns, however, that if Christians want to have their seat in the public square, then they must produce a kind of scholarship that is worth listening to—it cannot be an ideology that excludes the observable facts of existence, derides reason, or corrupts science.   Intelligent design is worth examining; Bishop Usher’s timetable for creation is far less acceptable. 

Marsden has produced the apologetic for tolerating Christians in the secular academy—an argument which Christians are willing to hear, even if it requires for us more self analysis, self criticism, and going the extra mile toward academic excellence. The real question is whether the secular elitist academy, dominated by its own ideological prejudices, is willing to listen to any scholar who professes the Apostle’s Creed.