Harvard’s Supposed Crisis of Faith

Newsweek’s Lisa Miller spills a lot of ink and raises a lot of dust in her article on “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith.” But her conclusion is small-bore and uncontroversial. Of course Harvard and all other colleges should offer and even require some exposure to religion and its attendant issues and debates. I have seen no evidence that Harvard thinks otherwise.
Miller has only two pieces of evidence supporting the idea that Harvard has insulted the study of religion. The first is that there is no Religion Department, just a Committee on the Study of Religion that relies on professors from other departments and from the Harvard Divinity School. But Harvard lacks a lot of majors that other schools have. Nobody complains about Harvard’s insult to journalism, or accounting, or criminal justice, or education. Certainly nobody can say Harvard is unfriendly to future lawyers and businesspeople, though there’s no pre-law or business major. Yes, Harvard’s religion program probably suffers from a relative lack of attention and funding and power. But different universities have different strengths, and Harvard doesn’t have to be, and certainly isn’t, the best at everything.
Miller’s other piece of not-so-damning evidence is that Harvard’s recent curricular reform produced a one-course requirement in “Culture and Belief,” rather than the proposed “Reason and Faith.” Miller notes correctly that among the courses that would count for this requirement are ones that have little or nothing to do with religion. But all the courses that should be there, are, and Miller’s unspoken and unproven assumption is that “Reason and Faith” would be any different from “Culture and Belief.” The truth is, all of these core requirements at Harvard are incredibly loose and general. The problem is not that Harvard doesn’t require you to learn about religion; the problem is that it doesn’t require you to learn about anything, really. It’s Brown with the trappings of Columbia.
Of course Harvard could be unfriendly towards religion in less formal ways. But why would that interest a national magazine audience? Miller wants to prove that Harvard has an institutionalized problem with religion and to recommend that its administrators, and secular liberals more generally, take religion seriously as a subject worthy of study. But she really offers no proof that Harvard administrators dismiss religion (in fact, she quotes ex-president Derek Bok expressing disdain for Steven Pinker’s hardcore anti-religion views) or that students and teachers of religion are slighted in some unusual way.
And I’d have to dispute, for my part, that a Harvard education is anti-religion even in subtle ways. Miller quotes a Catholic sophomore who does “not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year.” I can only assume this sophomore was taking a hardcore math curriculum. I consider religion only a secondary interest, so I haven’t even ventured to the Divinity School, but let’s do a quick rundown of my curricular history, for those who can tolerate it.
I fulfilled a science requirement by taking a class on evolution that spent a solid couple of weeks on intelligent design and other religious perspectives on the universe, and we had a great section discussing the relationship between faith and science. I fulfilled a literature requirement by taking a class that included a unit on ancient Roman religion; took a freshman seminar that dealt with the interaction between religion, morality, and law; and am now taking Intro to African American Studies, which of course deals extensively with the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and their ancestors. And now I’m taking a Social Studies tutorial on “Religion and Politics in Modern America.” You can get a decent dose of religion at Harvard without even taking classes that are explicitly or solely about religion.
I was interviewed by Miller for her article many months ago, and was disappointed that she did not use any of the quotes I gave her. After all, I totally reaffirmed her thesis: of course religion is important to study, I said, even or especially if you’re a nonbeliever. But I also said, or implied, that she was wasting her time with this article, because religion is not in nearly such dire straits at Harvard as she supposed. I wish she had at least quoted me, even if she wasn’t going to listen to me!
Photo credit: Flickr stream of pobrecito33.