Of Faith and Reason

Is the language of religion a conversation stopper or an avenue to further intellectual and spiritual inquiry at Middlebury?

By Matt Jennings
Photography by Bridget Besaw

“Why should anyone care?”

James Davis, an assistant professor of religion and an ordained Presbyterian minister, gazed at the students, faculty, and local clergy seated in rows of folding chairs in the garden behind the president’s house. The question was directed at him, and he let the weight of the query sink in—it was, after all, why roughly 75 people had gathered at 3 South Street on a warm and sunny September afternoon—before he finally answered it.

“I think it’s fairly straightforward,” he said. “I believe that no less than the future of moral discourse is at stake.”

For the past hour, Davis and Laura Lieber (an assistant professor of classics and religion and an ordained rabbi) had challenged the use of an expression that has roiled the waters of the so-called culture wars: the notion of a Judeo-Christian ethic—specifically, Is there one?

In back-to-back lectures at an event convened by Middlebury’s Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, the religion scholars debunked a phrase that has recurrently popped up on the airwaves, in editorials, and between hard covers of bestsellers and has been used to define “social values.” And while their speaking styles differed—if you were to close your eyes during Lieber’s presentation, which was laced with humor and self-deprecation, you’d swear you were listening to an NPR commentary; Davis sounded like, well, a speaker delivering a lecture from a podium—their conclusions did not diverge.

After Lieber had rejected the term as exclusionary and divisive and framed entirely from the Christian perspective, Davis concurred, stating: “I agree with Laura that the answer to the question, ‘Is there a Judeo-Christian ethic’ is a resounding ‘No.’” It’s bad history, it’s bad theology, it makes no sense on either side of the hyphen, Davis continued. Later, during a question-and-answer session, Davis was asked if the phrase was so attractive because it demonstrates a moral compass. “Perhaps,” he replied. “But if so, it is appealing to the lowest common denominator.”

Though lots of people nodded along with Davis and Lieber, not everyone agreed. Skepticism was etched on the faces of several students, and one professor challenged Lieber’s interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Still, what was not in dispute was the under-lying premise of the gathering: why the debate should be engaged at all.

In a January 2005 essay titled “One University, Under God?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish, an emeritus dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, posited that religion would succeed “high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class, as the center of intellectual energy in the academy.” It is a theory that Gus Jordan does not dispute.

Jordan is the director of Middlebury’s Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, a position he has held since the center was opened in 2004. He is a slender man of medium height, has blond hair that has all but receded from his forehead, and wears oval rimless glasses. A native of Georgia, he still speaks with a soft, Southern lilt.

Jordan says that the Scott Center was created to facilitate the development and integration of religious and intellectual practices—to bring ethical and moral conversations back into the fabric of the community. “If you think about the Chaplain’s Office providing a direct spiritual role with the students and the community, the Scott Center is broadening that mission to interact with the intellectual life of the College,” Jordan says. (The Chaplain’s Office is part of the Scott Center, and Jordan’s wife, Laurie Macaulay Jordan ’79, is the chaplain. It was Laurie who conceived the idea for a center for spiritual life when she assumed the role of chaplain a decade ago.) “We’re cross-disciplinary, cross-divisional. Our purpose is to address the practice of faith traditions in one’s life and integrate it into the intellectual life of the community.” The Davis-Lieber lecture at the president’s house was the first of what he hopes will be many opportunities where the Middlebury community can congregate to discuss and debate the great moral and ethical issues of the day.

Yet as Fish wrote in his essay, “it is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. To take religion seriously would be to regard it not as a phenomenon to be analyzed at arm’s length, but as a candidate for truth.” Jordan, who is an ordained Methodist minister and has a Ph.D. in psychology, says that his biggest challenge is to convince busy students that ethical questions impact them. But there is also the culture of the academy itself. In a recent survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, 62 percent of college juniors nationwide reported that their professors never encouraged discussions of spirituality or religion, and 56 percent said their professors had never provided opportunities to discuss the meaning of life. It’s an issue that mirrors one of society’s more pertinent questions: Can religion contribute positively to moral debate or is it a conversation stopper?

“That’s what college is for, right?” Jordan says, tilting his head. “If we can’t question convention and explore these kinds of issues here….”

**

Last fall, a task force at Harvard University recommended that the Ivy League institution revamp its undergraduate curriculum to incorporate the required study of religion. Louis Menand, the noted essayist and a professor of English and American literature at Harvard (and a co-chair of the task force), championed the proposal, telling the Chronicle of Higher Education that “if we’re looking to help students prepare themselves to be ethical citizens for democracy and a global society—characterized by rapid change and conflicts between reason and faith and by massive social change and changes in quality of life introduced by science and technology—these are areas we want to make sure they have an understanding of…. Twenty years ago, we might not have thought it was important that students need to understand something about religion, but we felt that it is something secular universities may not be preparing students to deal with.”


Justin Stearns, a visiting instructor of religion at Middlebury, couldn’t agree more with Menand’s assertion that the study of religion is vital to the understanding of the world around us, but he gives a little more credit to what he calls the “secular majority,” which, he says “has come to terms that they need to understand the motivating force of the religious.”

Of course, it’s not as if the study of religion has ever been absent from higher education. Courses on the history and literature of religion (think Old Testament, metaphysical poetry) have been staples of academic curricula for generations. Now, however, many religion scholars are paying close attention to the way faith intersects with modern society.

Stearns, who specializes in Islamic thought, conducted a seminar this fall on the Qur’an. “With so much pressure being put on the text,” he says, “it’s exciting to be teaching it now. Yet it takes a while for the students to get comfortable, it’s easy to fall back into Manichean (black and white) thinking. There’s a lot in the Qur’an that does not sit right with the students. But it’s my hope that we can move past this impatience, this thought of ‘this is wrong,’ because the Qur’an can teach us a great deal about being human—think about how many people it has influenced. The significance of the book is not words on the page but how people have given them meaning.”

Toward the end of the semester, Stearn’s seminar focused on the Qur’an and modernity. On a chilly afternoon in early December, the class gathered in its regular meeting place, a seminar room on the fourth floor of Old Chapel, directly above the president’s office. Six students sat around a large conference table, while Stearns stood before a white dry-erase board, black marker in hand. The discussion was centered on a pair of Muslim scholars from the 19th and 20th centuries—Mohammad Abduh and Sayyid Qutb—who held opposing views on the role of Islam in the modern world.

For nearly an hour, Stearns feverishly tried to keep pace with the discussion, notating the students’ thoughts and ideas on the white board—“Renaissance = Enlightenment = modernity??? ...Abduh (d. 1905) pro-modernity, Qutb (d. 1966) anti-Western, anti-modern?”—while also subtly encouraging the students to dig deeper.

“So Qutb sees parallels between the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt in the 1950s and the Prophet,” Stearns said. “What are the implications here? Some of them are scary.”

Silence.

“Qutb found Egyptian society to be living in spiritual ignorance, right?” Stearns presses.

“Why was this so?”

“Because they were caught up in modernization,” one student offered.

Stearns nodded.

“Qutb is seeing emerging capitalism,” the student continued, “it’s Adam Smith via Marx to Said Qutb.”

Stearns smiled.

Outside, snow flurries began to drift past the windows, and while Stearns and his class continued their discussion of the Qur’an in the modern world, the sight of snow drew a visitor’s attention to the setting of the seminar itself and the cognitive dissonance of an intense discussion on Islam taking place in a former Christian chapel. Electric candles burned in the windows, which offered views straight out of Currier and Ives; in one, the white spire of the Congregational Church was centered perfectly in the window’s frame.

A few days later, James Davis, the religion professor who spoke at the president’s house, convened the final meeting of his course on religious ethics. It was a few minutes before 8 o’clock on a Monday morning, and students were slowly trickling in to the Gifford Hall classroom. With the enthusiasm of a coach, a clapping Davis exhorted—“Let’s go! Let’s go!”—the last few stragglers to hustle into the room before he shut the door.

“OK,” he began. “We spent the whole semester looking at the range of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic perspectives on moral issues; hopefully by now there’s no way for you to say ‘the Christian perspective on abortion is _______.’ Now I want to talk about the role of religion in the public moral debate. It’s an issue of critical importance in the American experience.”

Despite the early hour, Davis was brimming with energy and his dynamism quickly awakened what moments before had been a sleepy bunch of students.

“What’s the religion clause of the First Amendment?” he asked.

After some shuffling of papers, a student in the back read aloud: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“Right,” Davis said, before adding theatrically, “Wait a minute. You missed something. Where were the words ‘separation of church and state’?” Feigning surprise, he continued:

“What, it’s not in there?”

The class chuckled.

“It’s not in there because the term ‘separation of church and state’ does not occur in the First Amendment,” Davis said. “That phrase did not enter the American lexicon until Thomas Jefferson included it in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. And the point to this is, the First Amendment seems to dictate the protection of free expression and the prohibition of government from imposing a state religion on the people.”

After establishing that the Framers of the Constitution had never explicitly proscribed the intermingling of religion and politics, Davis laid out a series of arguments both for and against the exclusion of religion in politics (For: You can’t legislate morality; against: excluding religion robs public morality of valuable insight). Glancing at the clock, which showed that it was near the top of the hour, he began to wrap up: “So, what are our options? On the one hand, the esteemed political philosopher John Rawls suggests that religious reasons are not broad enough to consider when arguing for or against a political position. And I’ve just made three compelling arguments for why religion should be excluded from politics. But if religion and politics is wrong, what do we make of this?....”

As he asks this final question, Davis punches a few buttons on the podium at the front of the room. The lights dim, a screen drops down in front of the blackboard, and a projector mounted on the ceiling whirs to life.

And there on the screen is Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.

“I have a dream today.”

**

James Davis is sitting at a table in the Juice Bar and is talking about how he came to be teaching religion at a liberal arts school. The fall semester has ended, and he’s taking a break from grading papers, but if he’s tired or worn out, you’d never know it. There’s an All-American- Everyman-quality to Davis, whose boyish face, somewhat goofy sense of humor, and way of speaking calls to mind the actor Tom Hanks. He’s the first in his family to graduate from college, and he always assumed he’d go into the ministry—in fact, after earning a master’s in divinity, he spent five years in the pastoral ministry while a doctoral student at the University of Virginia. However, he found that he was more interested in teaching and decided to pursue a faculty position in a seminary. “I assumed that was how I’d connect my ecclesiastical loyalties with a desire to teach,” he said, but then he learned of a position in the religion department at Middlebury, teaching American religious history.

“For a person who was thinking about going into the ministry….” The sentence trails off as Davis laughs, but the implication is clear. A liberal arts school in Vermont where secularism is predominant is a long way from a House of God, but Davis adds, “I can’t imagine being anywhere else. In a sense, Middlebury is a microcosm of society. In class, we study the role of religion in public debates, and a great place to start is right.”

“I think students seem quite free and courageous to express their views in class. Outside, it’s a little harder for them to find their voice. There are cultural reasons for this. There’s an ethos associated with academe, generally, and liberal arts schools, specifically, that leads to an intolerance of views rooted in faith.”

A number of people who were interviewed for this story expressed a similar sentiment, which speaks to the core mission of Gus Jordan’s efforts at the Scott Center and reflects Stanley Fish’s contention that legitimizing the study of religion is one thing; welcoming religious viewpoints into campus discussions and debates is something else entirely.

Marie Lucci ’08 is a Spanish and religion major, and she serves as the president of the Newman Club, the Catholic student organization. Lucci says that she goes through periods when she feels comfortable talking about her faith and periods when she doesn’t.

“There are places where I feel so comfortable—within the religion department, among other people of faith. But in other situations, if people are less informed about and therefore less sensitive to the importance of religion in someone’s life, then religion is dismissed. Many of those times I feel that Catholicism, especially, is stereotyped. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘You’re Catholic? But you’re so normal.’

“But the potential is there,” to really engage the larger questions of faith and values, she adds. “Middlebury seems to be saying, ‘We want to empower people to tackle these issues.’ But it’s on us to do it.”

Karina Arrue ’07 is an English major from Jersey City, New Jersey. For her senior project, she is examining the role religion and spirituality plays in the lives of students at Middlebury. Arrue is also a devout Christian and says that before she arrived at Middlebury she had never really thought about how her faith, along with her mind, could inform her stance on issues, such as the environment and foreign affairs. “I simply assumed as a Christian, I was supposed to think a certain way,” she wrote on her blog, Upsurge: Contemplations of Religious Life at Middlebury. “I was shocked when not all the Christians I met on campus shared the same point of view on such key issues. It’s really uncomfortable when you find that things are not as you always thought they should be.”

“A certain level of discomfort is healthy,” Arrue says when asked about this notation in her blog. “But that doesn’t make it easy.” Like Lucci, she says there have been times when she’s censored herself when issues of faith come up in conversation—“I find myself walking on eggshells not to say something to stop the conversation”—but she’ll be the first to say that this aversion to conflict doesn’t serve the larger purpose of engaging the community. “It’s in the conflict of confrontation where prejudices are exposed,” she says, “but that can be a good thing. Because once something is exposed, it can be addressed. Until then, it’s just hidden. And it can breed resentment.”

Sometimes an event occurs when an issue looms so large that the community would be derelict not to address it. Take the controversy surrounding the 2005 publication in a Danish newspaper of a series of editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. The initial reaction was muted, but when the cartoons were reprinted in other newspapers around the world, protests ensued, including many violent demonstrations in the Middle East. At Middlebury, a group of students, including several members of the Islamic Society, organized a panel discussion to facilitate conversation about the controversy.

Febe Armanios, an assistant professor of history who specializes in the Middle East, moderated the panel. She remembers the early March day as one of those days when it was really cold outside, but broiling inside. The room in the Robert A. Jones ’59 House was packed, with people lining the back wall and sitting on the floor.

Armanios gave a brief opening presentation in which she gave the background of the controversy, and then she opened the floor for discussion.

“Of all the panels I’ve done since I’ve been here, it was the most uncomfortable yet engaging” Armanios says. “It got heated at times. People came at the issue from extreme points of view, both in condemning the publication and defending it. “I thought it was one of those issues where it was important to be critical of all sides, but I can see how from a belief standpoint, this could be hard.”

For all the discomfort, Armanios says, it’s critical if Middlebury is to be a place that welcomes debate. “I think there’s an interest to sustain it, but there’s an incumbency on the student body—a diverse student body—to make it happen.”

Gus Jordan expects the College’s Religious Life Council to play a leading role in furthering such efforts. Comprised of members of various religious organizations on campus, the Religious Life Council has evolved from a club of students interested in interfaith efforts to a leadership organization committed to addressing moral issues, says Chaplain Laurie Jordan.

This year, the Council worked with the Scott Center and the Chaplain’s Office to organize a Religious Life Awareness month at Middlebury—the first time such an event had unfolded over the course of an entire month (previous awareness events were weeklong affairs). More than 1,000 people participated in programs ranging from a symposium on social justice to prayer group meetings. Afterward, Associate Chaplain Ira Schiffer said that he felt that the monthlong event did a great job in furthering interfaith understanding. He pointed out that in December, members of the College’s Jewish organization, Hillel, joined with the Christian fellowship organization, in promoting and attending each other’s weekly meetings.

Yet this interfaith commingling shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Marie Lucci, the Newman president, says that she feels much more comfortable talking about her faith with others of faith, regardless of their religion. “Sometimes I need the comfort of being in a religious community.” Though Catholic, Lucci attends Hillel meetings just about every week—“I see a lot of similarities between the Catholic and Jewish liturgies”—and one of her closest friends is Rachel Bearman ’08, a co-president of Hillel. Over lunch recently, the two spoke passionately about what it means to be a person of faith at Middlebury—Bearman was so involved in the conversation that she didn’t touch her hamburger over the course of an hour—and they both agreed that interfaith relations on campus were vibrant and strong.

Schiffer agrees. “There’s a strong sense of support and camaraderie among the various religious organizations. And, in a sense, I think our office has been programming for our core group—the religious groups on campus. But that’s changing.”

Each fall, incoming first-years participate in a comprehensive survey, a portion of which measures religious beliefs. Over the past five years or so, about 30 percent of all first-years have indicated that they have no religious preference. (This year’s incoming class was slightly higher, with 39 percent responding that they had no religious preference.) These percentages are twice the national average of around 15 percent of matriculating freshmen who indicated they did not have a religious preference.

Schiffer says that the September 11 terrorist attacks sparked somewhat of a spiritual awakening at Middlebury. But still, he says, the College remains “an areligious, secular, and at times anti-religious place.” If the mission of the Scott Center is to succeed—and if Stanley Fish’s premise that religion will truly be the center of intellectual energy in the academy—boundaries will need to be stretched, beliefs challenged, and a ethos of inquiry embraced. “There’s too much at stake not to strive for this,” Schiffer says.

Sitting at his desk one December afternoon, he spins around to face his computer so he can read an Umberto Eco quote that perfectly illustrates this position.

“Only educational institutions, among them universities, are still the places where mutual confrontation and discussion and better ideas for a better world can be found,” Schiffer reads. “In my wildest dreams, there is the image of the academic milieu where even the most insolvable problems of our time can be peacefully discussed.”

“Worth striving for,” Schiffer says, “don’t you think?”