Curriculum: Studying God on Campus

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The scholarly study of religion, shorn of both catechism and clericalism, is fast becoming a major subject in secular U.S. colleges and universities. Two decades ago, only a dozen state-supported campuses had full-fledged religion programs; elsewhere, religion was usually nothing more than the Bible as literature, taught by English professors. Now, says Cyrus Pangborn, head of Rutgers' religion department, "universities recognize that the study of religion is as respectable a discipline as philosophy or sociology."

At least 75% of the nation's four-year colleges have religion courses; more than 20% of U.S. state schools have separate religion departments. Princeton, a Presbyterian-founded school that is now as secular as any state university, started a religion program in 1946 with one teacher, three courses and 70 curious students. Today the department has 14 professors, 20 courses, and an average enrollment of more than 1,000. At Iowa, which set up a pioneering religion department in 1927, courses now attract 3,500 of the university's 16,000 students. The 1½-year-old religion department at the University of California's Santa Barbara branch has five fulltime instructors and 600 students, including 20 majors.

From Barth to Caprew. In the medieval university, theology was queen of the curriculum, a position it lost—except at church-run schools—during the time of the Enlightenment. The new interest in religion on campus stems mostly from the 20th century Christian intellectual revolution that produced Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and the Niebuhr brothers, who proved that theology was relevant in the modern world.

Religion is still so new as a scientific discipline that universities are somewhat at odds about how to teach it. Columbia concentrates on a sociological approach. At Rutgers, the emphasis is on relating religion to modern life through courses on contemporary theological trends and the relation of religion to science. Princeton and Western Michigan lean heavily to religious history. Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley have no separate religion departments, but offer a number of courses in different departments. At Michigan, for example, primitive religion is taught in anthropology classes, the background of the Bible in the Near Eastern studies program.

Some universities still have to settle for what religion educators contemptuously call the Caprew (derived from Catholic-Protestant-Jew) approach: introductory courses about specific religions taught by ministers of these faiths. At the University of Texas, half a dozen courses are taught by local Bible instructors at student centers a couple of blocks off the campus. The courses are listed on the class schedule but not in the university catalogue: bewilderingly, they are acceptable for credit in the colleges of education and business administration, but not in engineering or pharmacy.