The History of Religion in American Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter surveys existing literature on the history of religion in American higher education with an eye both to piecing together the story and to pointing out gaps that remain. It likewise reflects on how this history can inform contemporary conversations about the purposes, moral and otherwise, of American higher education. The chapter begins with the original synthetic narrative of how religion has woven through American higher education -- and the separate synthetic narratives of women's and African American higher education. It then turns to how historians have revised aspects of this narrative for three broad time periods: the colonial and antebellum period, the Civil War through World War II, and the postwar period to the present. The chapter next considers more specialized scholarship on various aspects of the intersection between religion and American higher education: non-Protestant faiths, the field of religious studies, extracurricular student religious life, and Protestant faith-based institutions of higher education (theological seminaries, denominational colleges, and non-denominational evangelical and fundamentalist institutions). The chapter concludes with an evaluation of how religion has been treated in the recent wave of synthetic histories of American higher education that have incorporated more updated scholarship.