4
the character of the school, but also the tenuous future of the pervasively sectarian
doctrine.
“Two Spheres” and the Integration of Faith and Learning
In his study Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher
Education, Douglas Sloan argues that during the course of the 20
th
century, mainline
Protestants adopted a “two-realm theory of truth” that divided knowledge between
knowledge gained through science and empirical reason and knowledge gained through
“faith, religious experience, morality, meaning and value.” A product of modernity that
privileged knowledge rooted in the “quantitative, the mechanical, and the instrumental,”
this two-spheres view of faith and knowledge would lead to the increasing irrelevance if
not elimination of the “theological basis for the church’s engagement with higher
education.”
6
Sloan, then, sees the relationship of faith and knowledge as a key to
explaining the secularization of church-related higher education in the United States.
James Burtchaell, Robert Benne, George Marsden, and others have revealed that
this tendency to bifurcate faith and knowledge at religious institutions of higher education
was not unique to mainline Protestant institutions. They argue that even though many
Evangelical and Catholic schools have retained a more vital religious identity than their
mainline Protestant counterparts, the adoption by some of a two-spheres model of faith
and learning will inevitably lead to an “epistemological crisis” as schools seek and
achieve greater academic prestige and cultural recognition.
7
In practice, the two-spheres
6
Sloan, Faith and Knowledge, vii-x.
7
While crucial, neither Benne nor Marsden would argue that secularization of higher education was driven
purely by epistemology. Both identify other sources such as private funding, key personalities, and
governance. See Burtchaell, Dying of the Light, 819-51; Marsden, “The Soul of the American University,”
Convention