This article was originally published in the Public Justice Review series "The Sacred Sector and Public Justice: Diversity in the Public Square" in February 2020.
BY John Larrivee
Faith-based universities (FBUs) are uniquely positioned to support faith-based organizations (FBOs) in their unique role in engaging the world. This includes work external to the university through assistance to FBOs, including research, developing networks dedicated to their support, etc. It also includes internal programs to assist students in understanding and contributing to civil society in ever more complex ways. In practice, civil society centers at faith-based universities like Mount St. Mary’s would help facilitate the work of faith-based programs. Academically, civil society centers could provide the analytical foundation for all of campus to learn the role of civil society as distinct from the economy and state. Together, civil society centers at faith-based universities could link both theory and practice, embodying the church’s idea of the human condition and activity in the world, while providing a way in which faith-based universities can themselves have a positive impact on society. The concept of civil society centers at faith-based universities (FBUs) aligns with a public justice framework because such centers empower FBUs to fully live into their God-given institutional gifts and capacities, thereby more fully advancing their right roles and responsibilities as Christian institutions of higher education.
While civil society centers at religious universities may also serve non-religious organizations, particularly those nearby, as well as cover civil society generally, their primary mission would be to empower faith-based organizations in their unique efficacy in the world. The distinct fundamental academic contribution of faith-based universities is to fill in when the reductionism of the academy has blinded it to a richer, more accurate account of human action and obscured more effective ways of meeting human needs. FBUs’ unique service to society is to empower those institutions left undeveloped by that academic gap. Overall, the concept of civil society centers within faith-based universities not only provides an important way for the FBUs to have extraordinary impact on society, it could help make them among the most sophisticated undergraduate programs in the country.
Civil Society in Academia: From Founding Ideals to Unreflective Student Service
To be most effective, a center for civil society at a university today needs to blend external action, research, theory, curriculum, and student life. But these functions must flow from drawing the appropriate lessons from a complex combination of philosophical, historical, academic, and institutional histories and responses to contemporary concerns. This article reviews those relevant pieces with implications for the functions of faith-based university civil society centers.
The role of civil society stems from the basic view of human nature: people are more than animals, and have some capacity to act freely on the basis of ideas. For most of human history, most cultures and traditions assumed some level of active human subject. From that understanding, good societies are formed by the development of good people, through the cultivation of virtue and the passing on of ideals. In that vision, civil society has a critical part to play in forming virtues and teaching ideals. Naturally, religion serves a particularly important role in both. Moreover, many social problems have elements that cannot be fully solved with government checks, redistribution, economic change, delivery by drone, etc., and instead need the personal relationship and ideals central to civil society.
Civil Society in U.S. History
The United States was founded with that view of the human condition central to our experiment in ordered liberty. Civil society–particularly families and churches–served as the primary “seedbeds of virtue,” in cultivating virtue and character, and in passing on the ideals on which to act. These ideals included self-reliance and service to others. In addition, these institutions served as “mediating institutions,” providing natural groups for people to serve others, and guard against arbitrary forces in society and/or politics. That combination maximized freedom overall, to help people be more free both internally, and from oppression externally.
The idea of a civil society also fits with the circumstances of the first century of American life. In the United States, many problems people faced were often small scale or personal in nature, thus the emphasis on civil society from the founding made sense both from a political theory and cultural standpoint. Itt also was reasonable based on the scale and nature of the problems.
By the end of the 1800s, however, many new problems (market fluctuations, economic cycles, immigration, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of large business, etc.) arose whose magnitude was so large that they could not be addressed solely by emphasis on people, ideals, or small institutions: they needed larger scale government action. This was central to the Progressive era: government action to solve the rising large-scale problems, and, in some instances, to coordinate society.
Civil Society in the Social Sciences and Intellectual Trends of the Late 1800s
This period coincided with the rise of the social sciences, whose study of people and society documented how material factors caused many problems (and to what degree). Moreover, these material causes— aspects of physical existence and society—could be changed. As Pope Benedict XVI described, it appeared to transform many humanproblems into engineering problems that simply needed technological solutions. That provided an agenda for reform: change/reform those areas of society that create social problems; structure policies and social relations for the most positive outcomes.
The real need to address the large scale of some modern problems overlapped with another phenomenon of the time: the ideas themselves, particularly of philosophical materialism. A major dimension of the modern era, particularly after 1850, was an increasing embrace of the ancient Epicurean idea that the physical/observable universe is all that exists. While first applied to physical nature, then biology, it had to ultimately be extended to people as well. We had to ask: what is possible for human action/capacity if matter is all that exists, if people are only material beings? This integrated philosophy, science, and social theory in the all-encompassing spirit of the times. For some theorists it was just a matter of degree in theory, methodology and policy: some level of material factors obviously limit human freedom, they are the easiest to study and provide some places government policy can reform, so let’s start there.
Reductionism in the Modern University Blinded the Role of Individuals, Ideas, and Civil Society
In that materialist view, the role of individual action (free action on the basis of both ideas and ideals) and character/virtue as well as the institutions that build people individually and personally (i.e. civil society) fade in importance compared to the larger structures of the economy or society. Thus often without fully understanding it, modern universities embraced materialism and viewed the world through reductionism. Celebrating the fact that material causes to individual and social problems meant that we could solve them through changing the material factors, many ignored how extension of materialist reductionism to everything implied that people were not free. Focused on material factors almost exclusively, universities did little to cultivate a vision of when and how the individual person, ideas, and from there civil society could matter. Blending the ideas, social theory, and desire to support government efforts for larger scale policies, universities spent little effort to understand when problems were more small scale, at the individual level, and/or involved ideas and character, all dimensions more appropriate for civil society. Of course, universities were not simply passively accepting these ideas: often universities were the major promoters of these intellectual trends and their social implications.
Failure of Faith-based Universities to Study or Contribute to Civil Society Common
Surprisingly, and sadly, faith-based universities followed these trends nearly as fully as secular (materialist) universities did, focusing almost exclusively on how material factors affect people, and limit what they do. This both made sense (material factors were huge questions of the time) and was institutionally easier. It provided a pathway for university mission that could be easily embraced: follow the same intellectual approach as the rest of the academy, but add to it a focus on values, i.e. that approaches to social questions involved values of the religion, and that the religious emphasis of the college was largely expressed as ethics, ethical evaluation and application of ethics to individual and social circumstances. This became the hallmark of education at religious schools, and, as George Marsden notes, the path from mission to secularization and loss of religious identity entirely.
Marsden explores how faith-based universities largely took two pathways academically: focus on the religious atmosphere and culture of the university, or focus on ethics and issues. Schools taking the first became known for their robust Christian environment, which emphasized religious instruction and study of faith and values, but were limited in their appeal to students of faith. The second was more accessible to a broader, less religious audience. Most schools took the second. Both strategies, however, portrayed religious education as “secular education plus religious values and meaning,” which came to dominate the view of the role of Christian universities.
Neither path answered the basic question: how was a religious university different? The implication was that a secular education was perfectly fine, thus you only needed the “religious values and meaning” if you were part of the religion. No university adequately explored the academic question: did a worldview—materialist or religious—ever have consequences for analysis? Is the materialist approach missing something besides values and meaning that needs to be accounted for in theory and analysis itself? Thus the faith aspect never entered into any of the academic work—research, teaching, or application—of the faith-based universities. Over time, that failure gave the appearance that faith-based universities (and behind them, religion itself) contribute nothing to analysis of the world and appears irrelevant to it. Over time, the emptiness created by this problem allowed ever more originally faith- based universities to lose their mission due to inability to express any relevant academic distinction faith provided. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of even religiously grounded universities had rejected any religious foundation.
Examining Accelerated Religious Decline: Service as a Student Activity, Not an Academic Subject
These trends, paradoxically, reveal that service actually accelerated/contributed to the decline of religious mission. As Marsden documents, lacking any robust academic distinction provided by religion, many schools switched the focus of religious identity from academics to student life: in what ways did student life reflect a Christian view?
Many universities claimed that their religious mission was fine as long as student life radiated these aspects of Christian life. Thus, active participation in service projects implied that the Christian nature of the school was strong. In reality, this only masked the fact that faith never really mattered to the academic content of the university. In time, even these vestiges of Christianity in student life themselves became too thin, but by then there was too little faith left in the academic mission to retain anything, or reason to return to something seemingly without impact.
Moreover, conducted as a student life function, service was adequately separated from the academic program so that no-one seemed to catch the fundamental inconsistency that the university promoted personal service while teaching it didn’t matter! Student life offices enthusiastically encouraged service by students as moral, or developing life skills and habits. In contrast, the academic side, having embraced materialism and reductionism, taught social theories in which people were simply products of conditions, in which only material factors–not personal service–mattered. Despite all the hype to encourage service by universities everywhere, faith-based or not, the vast majority undermined any reason to do personal service by teaching theory in which it was irrelevant. Students today who challenge or wonder “Why should I do service if my service doesn’t matter?” can be excused for simply drawing the logical conclusion from the social theory presented in the classroom by the universities themselves. To this must be added the particular aspect of religious belief, and whether people can act on religious ideas and concepts. For faith-based universities, failure to explain how faith-based approaches could matter contributed to the general conclusion that faith itself—the ideas the religion has to offer—doesn’t matter. The failure to reflect upon the role of civil society did not just risk undermining student participation in service. Far more importantly, it undermined faith-based universities’ contribution to society through civil society itself. It blinded the universities to how civil society could matter, and from exploring how the university itself could contribute to civil society.
Sadly, the same reductionism FBUs adopted to be similar to the rest of the academy, blinded themselves both to the role of civil society, and to how they, as faith-based institutions with an academic focus, could contribute to civil society. This was not simply by sending students to the soup kitchens, but it was of universities— institutions established to empower other institutions—helping the organizations. This type of service went beyond the simple act of service and beyond students serving others, as important though that might be; this service requires serving those who serve.
Contributing to society might be the university as an organization serving other organizations, helping them become more effective at serving people. This requires a completely different level of attention and assistance. The next article in this two-part series on the role of the faith-based university in supporting civil society will explore ways in which FBUs can tangibly harness their resources to benefit local sacred sector institutions, as well as their own faith-based missions.
John Larrivee is an associate professor of economics at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, specializing in public finance and history of economic thought. He is director of the Mount’s BB&T Center for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Capitalism, which explores how views of the human condition shape our understanding of economics, business, and social theory about economic phenomena through the question of human freedom. Larrivee has extended that approach to demonstrate how a focus on the complexity of human action is the sophisticated and distinct contribution of faith-based universities to the academy generally, providing both theoretical insights and real world applications. Larrivee's work has included analysis and promotion of civil society, particularly of faith-based programs to build up, transform, and inspire people at the personal level.
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