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Religion and Higher Education:

Assessing the Constitutional Implications of

Integrating Faith and Learning at the Church-Related College

J. David Holcomb

University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

Introduction

The past decade has witnessed a growing scholarly interest in the secularization of

American church-related higher education.

This scholarship has included not only

explanations of why secularization has occurred, but also prescriptions for how it might

be avoided by colleges that seek to retain a distinctive Christian identity. Much of the

discussion has been dominated by academics who argue that the key problem for church-

related higher education has been epistemological. In short, they argue that the adoption

of an “atmospheric,” “two-realms,” or “two-spheres” view of knowledge (one that largely

separates the religious and secular functions of the educational institution) is much less

likely to sustain a vigorous Christian intellectual climate and, ultimately, a Christian

institutional identity.

Instead they argue that an institution’s religious identity will be

better preserved if a distinctly Christian worldview were to inform if not permeate the

institution’s curricular activities. While this “integration of faith and learning” is not new

to many evangelical Christian colleges associated with the Council of Christian Colleges

See, for example, Benne, Robert, Quality With Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep

Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001); Burtchaell, James Tunstead,
The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from the Christian Chuches
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001); Gleason, Philip, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher
Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Hughes, Richard T. and
William B. Adrian, eds. Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Success in the Twenty-First
Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From
Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Douglas
Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, Ky.:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).

Michael Beaty, Todd Buras, and Larry Lyon, “Christian Higher Education: An Historical and

Philosophical Perspective.” Perspectives in Religious Studies (Summer 1997); Sloan, Faith and
Knowledge, 144.