According to Clark Gilbert, the latest man to be called as an apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, American universities have lost their religion. Harvard, of which Gilbert is an alum, and higher education in general, he often noted while serving as commissioner of church education, began with a spiritual mission but later evolved to embrace secular learning. This, he explains, is even more reason for religious institutions, like Brigham Young University, to retain a faith-centered agenda.

Gilbert is far from alone in levying this critique. Accusing universities of losing their footing and undercutting the nation’s alleged Christian values is a common talking point in the modern culture wars. The current presidential administration has waged battle with several colleges for failing to accommodate, or even privilege, traditional religious perspectives. An instructor in Oklahoma lost her job when she gave a failing grade for an assignment that cited only the Bible. Have universities lost their way?

The history, of course, is much more complicated. It also underscores how previously marginalized groups, like Latter-day Saints, have been among the greatest beneficiaries of academic secularization.

The evolution of U.S. universities

Harvard did indeed begin by training ministers in 1636. Who else would preach the sermons to the recently arrived settler colonialists? And while the school took seriously the charge to train people from different ideological backgrounds, it maintained that one of its crucial goals was to build a moral and religious community.

Such was the goal for nearly all universities that appeared in the ensuing two centuries. Most college founders desired their institutions to promote faith and defend denominational views as part of their main agenda. (There were exceptions: Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the University of Virginia was designed to transcend such sectarian models.) Learning and investigation had to operate together with commitments to orthodoxy.

Yet many of these schools eventually were forced to adapt to new circumstances. Clergy-led institutions were increasingly seen as too rigid, intolerant and out of touch for America’s dynamic culture during the mid- to late-19th century. Compared to many European institutions, which prized open inquiry and proclaimed substantial scientific advances, American schools appeared backward, evidence that the nation could not keep up with the modern world.

So universities reformed. They dropped some ecclesiastical standards, hired professors with degrees from European schools, and widened the curriculum to incorporate broader academic discussions and meet civic aims. This shift, what some critics called “secularization,” meant that classrooms were more likely to engage issues and highlight voices that were previously considered unorthodox.

How Harvard became a world leader

Harvard went through this same evolution during the progressive era. Gilbert, in a 2022 address to BYU, highlighted the significance of Charles W. Eliot, who presided over the Massachusetts school from 1869 to 1909, as representative of his larger declension narrative. Eliot, according to Gilbert, pressed “open inquiry” rather than “knowing God” as the driving ideal. “But once spiritual learning was decoupled from secular inquiry,” Gilbert warned, “the path to secularization had been set.”

Eliot would disagree. In his influential “New Education” essay series, published in The Atlantic on the eve of his Harvard appointment, he argued that universities could be spiritual and critical. Schools merely had to be more nimble and less provincial. Significantly, Eliot continued to emphasize the religious mission of the school but tethered it to humanist examination and civic obligations. Harvard must also be willing to unsettle orthodox dogma, he argued, to enable intellectual curiosity.

Such a vision is what propelled the school to become a world leader in research and innovation.

Few professors embodied such a quest as well as William James. Hired a few years after Eliot’s ascension, James came to be one of the leading founders for American psychology and philosophy. But it was his contribution to religious scholarship that is most relevant here. Those who examine faith and its practitioners, he frequently taught, must be “pragmatic” in understanding their views without immediately proving or disproving their veracity. It was a framework that disturbed dogmatic belief and embraced pluralistic inquiry.

This did not mean that religion became any less significant. James argued the opposite. Only within the boundaries of open examination could the particulars of faith, the motivations of action and the legacies of devotion be understood. Such were the lessons of his famous Gifford Lectures on natural theology delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, then published in his canonical “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

Highlighting Joseph Smith

Notably, this pluralistic and pragmatic mindset enabled James to be one of the only prestigious academics of his era to take Mormonism seriously. His “Varieties” was perhaps the first scholarly work that discussed church founder Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” in a way that took for granted its sincerity and placed it alongside other religious theophanies. Harvard’s library contains many books on Mormonism that came from James’ private collection, many of which were sent to him by Latter-day Saint leaders, and he taught several Latter-day Saint students, including Levi Edgar Young, great-nephew of Brigham Young. James had even accepted an invitation to visit Brigham Young Academy (later BYU) in 1902, though had to back out due to poor health.

The modern American academy’s eventual embrace of Mormon studies, including the creation of several endowed chairs at elite institutions, is a direct result of these “secularizing” impulses.

Moreover, it was because of these shifts away from dogmatic commitments that Latter-day Saints themselves, not merely their histories, were welcomed within the ivory tower. It was only because these universities dropped their sectarian mission that Latter-day Saint students, previously seen as heretics and outsiders, were admitted and granted a seat at the table.

The very period that critics like Gilbert see as a decline in academia’s tradition, the progressive era’s reforms, was simultaneous to and the cause for Latter-day Saint assimilation.

Buckley’s broadside

So how did these beneficial shifts come to be seen as a betrayal? The origin is found in the deep foundations of today’s culture wars.

Commentator William Buckley, seen as a forerunner to today’s partisan climate, published “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” in 1951. The bestselling work, which narrated the recent graduate’s experience with his alma mater and critiqued the institution for its secularist agenda, became a blueprint for denouncing universities as bastions of liberalism.

Rather than providing a neutral space for pragmatic and open inquiry, Buckley warned, universities were undercutting faith and forgetting God. The nation had to turn back the clock to a previous age when religion and orthodoxy were paramount. As he would put it in his inaugural issue of National Review a few years later, it was time for conservatives to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Ever since, denouncing academia’s secular agenda has been a central point for the American right’s declension narrative. Richard Nixon famously declared that “the professors are the enemy” and placed prominent academics on his notorious enemies list. (Vice President JD Vance recently agreed.) Ronald Reagan attacked “radicalism” on university campuses while California’s governor and then built on that message while courting the religious right all the way to the White House.

That many of these critics of elite education benefited from those same institutions is beside the point.

Gilbert’s retrenchment

Gilbert has specifically cited James Tunstead Burtchaell’s popular diatribe, “The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities From Their Christian Churches,” as especially influential on his views. It is a quintessential example of the modern culture war rhetoric. Burtchaell, a Catholic priest and theologian who taught for decades at the University of Notre Dame, critiqued that school and many others for losing their spiritual compass. Christian institutions had squandered their religious mission, he asserted, in the search for accommodation.

(Burtchaell was forced to resign from Notre Dame in 1991 over sexual misconduct allegations.)

This was the ideological motive behind and justification for BYU’s retrenchment during Gilbert’s watch. New policies — including a new loyalty oath and further oversight of faculty and student expressions — are meant, according to the administration, to reassert the school’s religious mission and stave off secular inroads.

But what if these reforms overlook the benefits that have been gained by academic secularization?

Gilbert, who often speaks of his time at Harvard as instructive to his worldview, was able to attend the institution and teach in its Business School because of its evolution. He directly profited from this approach. Similarly, Mormonism has been taken seriously on the national stage because of the pragmatic frameworks provided by pluralist education. Secularism provided the academic language for toleration.

But the blinders that come with today’s culture wars often make invisible the very history from which we can, and should, learn.

Note to readers • Benjamin E. Park is author of “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism” and runs the YouTube Channel, Benjamin Park, Historian. This column is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.