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    A Place Somewhat Apart: The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University
    A Place Somewhat Apart: The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University
    A Place Somewhat Apart: The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University
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    A Place Somewhat Apart: The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University

    By Philip E. Harrold

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    The story of secularization and religious disestablishment in American higher education is told from the standpoint of a lively community of professors, students, and administrators at the University of Michigan in the late nineteenth century. This campus culture--one of the most closely watched of its day--sheds new light on the personal and cultural meanings of these momentous changes in American intellectual and public life. Here we see how religion was not so much displaced or marginalized in the heyday of university reform as translated into new arenas of public service and scholarly pursuit.
    The main characters in this story--professors Calvin Thomas and Henry Carter Adams--underwent profound religious crises of faith accompanied by major adjustments in their interpersonal relationships. Together, with students and administrators, their lives constituted a communal biography of religious deconversion. A close examination of these private and public worlds provides a more complete understanding of the dynamics behind new academic policies and intellectual innovations in a leading public university. The non-cognitive, intersubjective, gendered, quasi-religious shadings of academic modernism and early pragmatist philosophy, in particular, come to light in vivid ways. As John Dewey later observed, Michigan became an experimental laboratory for "new meanings to unfold, new acts to propose."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPickwick Publications
    Release dateOct 1, 2006
    ISBN9781630878658
    A Place Somewhat Apart: The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University
    Author

    Philip E. Harrold

    Philip Harrold is Associate Professor of Church History at Winebrenner Theological Seminary. He completed his PhD in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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      Book preview

      A Place Somewhat Apart - Philip E. Harrold

      A Place Somewhat Apart

      The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University

      Philip Harrold

      A PLACE SOMEWHAT APART

      The Private Worlds of a Late Nineteenth-Century Public University

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series 63

      Copyright © 2006 Philip Harrold. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

      ISBN: 1-59752-619-3

      EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-865-8

      Cataloging-in-Publication data

      Harrold, Philip

      A place somewhat apart: the private worlds of a late nineteenth-century public university / Philip Harrold.

      Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2006

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series 63

      xii + 242 p.; 23 cm.

      ISBN 1-59752-619-3 (alk. paper)

      1. Church and state—United States—History 2. United States—Religion. 3. United States—Church history—19th century. 4. United States—Church history—20th century. 4. University of Michigan—History. I. Title. II. Series.

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series

      K. C. Hanson, Series Editor

      Recent volumes in the series

      Richard Valantasis et al., editors

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      Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, editors

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      The Reformed Pastor by John Williamson Nevin

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      The Arminian Confession of 1621

      To Martin E. Marty
      with gratitude.
      To Carol
      with love.

      Foreword

      In current debates over the role of religion and secularity in American culture the use of three words ending in -ation signal choices that often both inform and confuse the issues. The three that come to my mind are polarization, accusation, and generalization.

      These inform the issue because admittedly in the arenas of the debate there are poles, staked out positions and people to defend them against others in such a way that they all but force everyone boldly to choose between one or the other. Accusation is next, because many of the debates are characterized by arguments among those who know they are right and that everyone else is wrong, really wrong, and must be brought to judgment or simply be denounced. Generalization, third, comes in, because if one paints the issues with a broad brush and deals with subtleties as if they were giant masses, it is easier to score points. And doing all that, as mentioned, confuses the themes.

      To illustrate in the case on which Philip Harrold wants to throw light:

      Polarization: in the newly standard descriptions, radical modernists a century and more ago trampled the temples of Christian learning and willfully or thoughtlessly erected bastions of secularism. Or, on the other hand, defensive traditionalists tried to hold on to inherited collegiate patterns, and made no effort to address the changing modern world.

      Accusation has characterized much of the talk and writing, because the other has been seen as either traitor to tradition and Christian learning or belligerent defender of what could not have served in that changing world.

      Generalization colors much of the talk because from a distance it is easier than close up to observe and speak of the Christian university or the university which valued Christian influences versus agnostic professoriates who wanted to purge the culture of all forms of religion.

      Happily, Philip Harrold opens a window on one part of that world in such a way that those who read him are likely to deal more patiently than before with the middle ground between the poles, the particulars that made and make up the complex academic world, and the attempt to understand the complex processes by which earnest and thoughtful people wrestled with the issues of university and personal life in the late 19th and early 20th century. Harrold has to be classified among the least polemical scholars one can find, not because he does not have clear positions and emergent convictions but because, to use the word he uses, he has interests in sympathy.

      By focusing on two individuals of note—neither of them so noted that we have them typed in advance—he provides a picture of the striving and struggling that went on among students whose crises cannot be written off as merely adolescent. This he follows with a story of how they worked through their struggles and how sensitive they had to be to people they feared they would hurt, or who they were sure would not understand. And Harrold serves well also by providing that close-up of a struggle at a single place, not an insignificant one: the University of Michigan was the largest university in the United States in the period in which these dramas took place. Michigan was much observed as a scene of experiment, and this book shows what the experimenting looked like. One sees little smart-aleckness or abruptness among the strugglers who, a reader is tempted to say, seemed to try everything to make things work.

      Rilke wrote of people who lived at a time in the turning world when no longer what’s been and not yet what’s here appeared. The two young men and some of their mentors studied and reflected and then found that what’s been as modes of learning and means of integrating faith and reason, science and sensibility, no longer worked for them. Yet neither of them successfully framed a synthesis that could serve as a pattern for everyone who would follow them. It struck me, when Harrold first introduced Thomas and Adams to me, that such as they serve better than do the self-assured as exemplars, models, or path-finders. I deduced that, because the recent debates so often close off the complex possibilities and obscure the unsettled issues that should inspire but no longer even haunt those who know exactly what went right, or wrong, as universities changed. There are enough stories of conversions, but there have been too few of de-conversions, the turns that give plot to this book.

      Memoirs today often seem to resolve more than Adams and Thomas or their colleagues and their followers were able to do. In the religious realm, priced at a dime-a-dozen are those autobiographies which testify to the repressive religious and cultural climate in which one grew up until she or he was converted to enlightenment, freed from tradition and bondage. Or, for there always has to be an or in a polarized world, the market is full of memoirs by people hardly anticipated by Adams and Carter, those who inhabit a world of return to religion, and to religions of sorts the two of them would never have called liberating or enlightened.

      Conversion and deconversion in Harrold’s account do not occur with a blinding flash of light that impels a person one day in one move to turn from old ways and follow the always-new or, conversely, to turn around back to those ways and to hold on to them. I hope that others will pick up the trail on the historians’ path that Harrold has taken and help provide us with many biographies of other followers of the confused routes people of interest took and take. We might learn then not to settle for cynicism but for modesty, not for ideology about religion and the secular but for scholarship and—yes, it’s Harrold’s favored word—sympathy.

      There are many side-offerings here that can delight the reader. The personal glimpses, via letters and reflections, illustrate how informed and thoughtful parents and children, fiancés and fiancées and, later, spouses could be. For me one of the pleasures was to picture a world—be careful, M.E.M., and don’t lapse into nostalgia—when Bildung (let Harrold define it)—was available or desired among ordinary folk and emergent elites alike. They inhabited a world in which literary allusion and theological themes were linguistic and spiritual coins-of-the-realm. These well-stocked minds had resources on which to draw. One wishes that more of higher education provided more resources for such today. To make much of that point, however, might lead me to engage in polarization, accusation, and generalization. Instead, I want to invite readers to enjoy, be informed by, and to reflect after reading this previously untold story.

      Martin E. Marty, Emeritus Professor

      The University of Chicago

      Introduction

      In the late nineteenth century, colleges and universities participated in a broad cultural shift in the United States sometimes referred to as the second disestablishment of religion. ¹ Protestant hegemony in public life faced a variety of new challenges ranging from the widespread promotion of scientific authority to unprecedented waves of non-Protestant immigrants. Cherished notions of a Christian state and society and a pervasive moral code based on Protestant beliefs and values were especially vulnerable in the arena of higher education. Founded by evangelical Protestants and, for the most part, still under their control through the 1870s, America’s colleges and universities became important locations for reckoning and adjustment. The old college regime of discipline and piety and its curriculum based on moral philosophy and natural theology seemed out of touch with the latest intellectual and social developments. ² Under the banner of university reform, religion was revised and relocated to serve an expanding array of educational objectives. The modern university, according to its leading advocates, pursued new knowledge using the most sophisticated methods. Of necessity, the traditional emphasis on apologetics in the sciences gave way to research and more rigorous applications of the scientific method. In the humanities, traditional modes of religious authority were supplanted by appeals to the inner domain of human consciousness. Instructional techniques, curricula, campus organizations, and an entire infrastructure of new or newly reorganized institutions were formed around these priorities. In effect, a modern ‘paradigm space’ was constructed that was no longer bound to denominational control or explicit theological convictions. ³

      Historians generally agree that the rise of the modern university had a major impact on the intellectual culture and public life of the nation. It became the principal location for the organized production of new ideas.⁴ It provided an institutional backdrop (or ‘public’) for a modernist impulse in academic disciplines ranging from theology and philosophy to the social sciences.⁵ It served as the central training ground and recruiting station for a middle-class professional elite.⁶ The university also made room for women scholars, gradually expanding their career prospects in a wide range of fields by the turn of the century.⁷ Of course, none of these far-reaching changes occurred without profound adjustments in the local culture of each university. The new of public and private interests. At the personal and interpersonal levels, new norms and expectations were negotiated, sometimes with profound consequences for life beyond the academy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of religion. Disestablishment in higher education was anything but a straightforward product of the secularizing forces in American society. A closer look at specific academic communities inevitably presents a more complicated story of gains as well as losses, enthusiastic innovation alongside unresolved tension and deep-seated ambivalence.⁸

      This dissertation approaches the subject of disestablishment in higher education as a highly situated constellation of attitudes and behaviors, beliefs and practices. The purpose here is not to challenge the general perception among historians that higher education became more secular in the late nineteenth century. Rather, through detailed examination of published and unpublished sources from a historically concrete instance of institutional reform, this study seeks to frame an alternative perspective on this sweeping development. We will demonstrate that certain types of concerns prevailed over others, resulting in new criteria for judging the meaning and the merits of the changes underway. The outright abandonment of religion was generally not among these concerns. More significant, at the individual level, was the conscious rejection or disconfirmation of a particular way of being religious. This process, herein referred to as deconversion, was, for many, the personal corollary to disestablishment. The chapters that follow examine the tensions and struggles associated with this transformation, especially during the early years of the reform movement when a sense of discontinuity with a religious past was most acute.

      Deconversion is distinctive in a number of important ways. From a literary standpoint, it often prompts intense autobiographical reflection on the loss of faith.⁹ In the individual cases examined over the course of this investigation, the impulse to narrate religious transformation is evident in intermittent autobiographical passages contained in private letters and journals. These passages disclose the recognition of uncritical acceptance of evangelical beliefs, frequently in conjunction with a search for individuality and autonomy. Not surprisingly, they dwell on the nature of religious experience and the possibilities for extending particular aspects of that experience into new arenas of being and action. We will also observe how deconversion can generate a community of discourse around these narratives and their reconstructive endeavors. In this capacity, deconversion becomes a cultural undertaking that influences institutional and social interactions. Throughout we highlight the peculiar aspect of mourning in deconversion—the impulse to reflect on and transform the loss of religious symbols, relationships, and ‘wholenesses’ into what Peter Homans calls new structures of appreciation and meaning. This impulse usually involves intense negotiation, making deconversion a protracted and, in some cases, inconclusive affair.¹⁰

      Deconversion may constitute only one slice of a broad and complex subject, but it permits us to highlight an often overlooked component of disestablishment: the deep-seated religious ambivalences associated with modernizing reforms.¹¹ Tensions between feelings of separation and retrieval, alienation and belonging are by-passed even among revisionist historians who oppose an over-simplified ‘revolution’ model of interpretation. While George Marsden and, more recently, Julie A. Reuben, have led the way in providing more nuanced understandings of the secularization of the academy, their projects have not included the thick description required to define some of the most basic religious concerns. In other words, they have not sufficiently accounted for the varied ways that ideas, institutional practices, and personal needs and motivations overlap. The religious struggles of a new generation of reform-minded professors, have, in particular, received surprisingly little attention in the literature. As a result, widely documented mediating strategies as complex as the sacralizing of science or, conversely, methodological secularization are understood apart from the most fundamental religious experiences and concerns of the historical agents under examination.¹²

      If, as David A. Hollinger has argued, questions—especially those arising in a communicative context of shared experiences and perceptions—are at the heart of discourse, then an emerging repertoire of speech and behavior that revolves around a common set of concerns should provide a useful window to the internal dynamics and transformation of a particular community.¹³ Such, in fact, was the case at the University of Michigan during its most active period of modernization. A preview of this lively community reveals some of the more pressing issues which animated intense discussion and some of the incoherencies and fractures which typified the emerging academic culture in colleges and universities scattered across the nation.

      In the 1870s and early 1880s, Michigan was the largest university in the nation and the most successful experiment, thus far, in state-funded higher education. It was also an acknowledged leader in university reform, earning the praises of prominent educators like Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White.¹⁴ Under the direction of its first lay president, James B. Angell (1871–1909), Michigan was among the first institutions to eliminate mandatory chapel and church attendance in favor of a voluntary system of on-campus religious activities directed by the Student Christian Association and off-campus ministries sponsored by local churches. Concurrently, the school gained a national reputation for its ambitious plan to become a major research institution rivaling The Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. The academic years from the fall of 1880 to the spring of 1884 were a highpoint for Angell and his new faculty recruits. In addition to the founding of a School of Political Science—designed to train young people for careers in civil service—new laboratories, seminary rooms, and a library were constructed, and requirements for advanced degrees were expanded to include evidence of the power of original research and of independent investigation.¹⁵ At the undergraduate level, a new curriculum known as the University System was launched. Although some components of the program were short-lived, certain themes endured in the university campaign. Students enjoyed more freedom than ever before in selecting their courses. This meant that they could concentrate on those subjects which were deemed relevant to their chosen professions. One of the more attractive benefits was the opportunity to enjoy "the advantages of such specialization as can be given to students at this stage of advancement."¹⁶

      Aside from all the outward enthusiasm for freedom, relevance, and specialization, members of the academic community also portrayed their modern university in more ambiguous terms as a questioning world. A writer for the leading student paper on campus, The Chronicle, extolled the virtues of new fields of inquiry, especially in the social sciences, because they dealt with questions of living interest, questions which are before the American people for solution today, and not with dry, abstract theories.¹⁷ But another writer observed that all the new science, new philosophy, new religion, new everything prompted an even more difficult question: [i]f the institutions of the past are shown to be false, or, if not false, out of date, why should they longer be reverenced? It was one thing to celebrate advancements in learning but quite another to discern their impact on cherished beliefs and practices. Caution was warranted: Now it is not the progress that is to be deprecated, for that is real; nor the unmasking of whatever has deceived mankind in the past; but it is the flippancy and irreverence which show themselves in thoughtless minds that are only too glad of an excuse for thinking that nothing has any claims upon them. Such thinking deprived humanity of its counsels in matters spiritual, turning faith, purity, honor into unmeaning symbols. Ultimately, only an alert conscience could resist this spirit, reverencing that which was worthy, wherever found, whether fashionable or despised.¹⁸

      A predominantly male population of students drew increasing attention in local campus media to a troubling issue that President Angell was obliged to address, sometimes rather awkwardly, in off-campus circles. Speaking at a gathering of the Evangelical Alliance in nearby Detroit, he reluctantly acknowledged that many young men at the University of Michigan were experiencing religious doubt. There was one type of doubter, in particular, who had deemed it necessary to question every accepted belief, challenging all opinions, especially those which have been held sacred. Picking up on a theme that was echoed in The Chronicle, Angell suggested that this attitude could be blamed on false pride and a desire to conceal . . . poverty of thought or shallowness of nature. Fortunately, most students understood this, he insisted, providing those drastic remedies which [they] apply so effectively to affectation and pretense. In other words, the voluntary system of religious accountability, which supposedly thrived at the University, held irreverence in check. But what about the less vociferous doubters on campus? Here Angell struggled to find an adequate answer. He could only deny that disestablishment was itself to blame, at least directly, for the spiritual struggles of students. More personal factors, especially those pertaining to the youthful quest for manhood, had to also be considered, he argued—factors seemingly unrelated to university life itself.¹⁹

      One of Angell’s safeguards in the battle against doubt was the University faculty. Professors were, he thought, doing science and religion an equal service by stimulating pupils to the earnest, honest, courageous pursuit of truth, and by impressing them [students] with the conviction of the essential harmony of all truth.²⁰ Above all, the positive Christian influences of a teacher’s noble character taught by precept and example the worth of true character and a pure life.²¹ Benjamin Cocker, Michigan’s aging professor of moral philosophy, was among those who knew how to work gently with students undergoing honest doubting. His stock of settled principles had endured every wind of doctrine, providing for many troubled souls something firm to rest the feet upon, a faith in God that amounts to confidence, and a conscious, intelligent acceptance of Christ as a Savior.²² By 1880, however, Angell looked to younger instructors who were more in tune with the latest reconciling strategies between religion, science, and philosophy. Equally important, they were more thoroughly acquainted with the norms and expectations of scholarly manliness. Cocker’s successor in the philosophy department, George Sylvester Morris, insisted that doubt was not readily addressed by traditional dogma or citations of scripture. This merely begged the question that he thought most disturbed students: whether a divine Scripture is any way possible or indeed exists. Rather than withdraw into a shell of cottage Christianity, Morris advised students to embrace idealist constructions of God as pure spirit, force, and mover—the sole person of absolute and independent reality.²³ Through the likes of Morris and a younger generation of faculty, religious doubt gradually became an intensively ‘managed’ affair at Michigan, paving the way for innovation and modernist reconstructions of religion.

      Everyone agreed that in matters of religious belief and practice the acquisition of new knowledge was painfully consequential for young scholars. Relationships might be severed, distancing troubled souls from parents or formative communities. Some were beguiled from a peaceful, loving faith in God and man, perhaps leading to doubt of all goodness in both.²⁴ Even The Monthly Bulletin of the Student Christian Association was compelled to acknowledge that the freedom of discussion and thought on campus caused students to give up outgrown dogmas, leading, perhaps, to a lonely and debilitating attack of infidelity.²⁵ Skeptical vocabulary filled the air, generating a religious self-consciousness that was unprecedented in the history of the school. While outsiders, especially those representing the interests of smaller Christian colleges and their supporting denominations, were scandalized by these frank admissions of religious doubt, campus residents—faculty and students alike—saw them as a necessary by-product of disestablishment and the atmosphere of honesty and openness fostered by university reform. Certainly a religious crisis was painful and no one relished the feelings of loss and separation that it might entail. But those who wrote or spoke publicly on the subject, Angell included, were beginning to accept such struggles as a normal rite of passage in their education. For its part, the Student Christian Association gradually accepted doubt as valid proof of sincerity, perhaps divine love.²⁶ While it was still beyond the bounds of propriety to reject the church outright, at least in public, many Michigan students and faculty felt as if they had already begun to separate themselves from inherited beliefs. Ties to the surrounding churches of Ann Arbor, in particular, were becoming more tenuous—an ominous sign given the voluntary principle of the new regime. Ultimately, few residents of Michigan’s thriving university could be deeply certain of where religion was headed in local campus life.

      The ethic of honest doubt, though widely publicized in the academic community at Michigan, was a deeply experiential matter interwoven with concerns as varied as the quest for masculine autonomy, the ambiguities of moral philosophy, and the felt absence of a personal God. It prompted intense autobiographical endeavors where moral and spiritual dilemmas could be explored. In a majority of cases, self-acknowledged doubters had to confront evangelical pasts and the relationships which had sustained their ties to formative faith communities. Selective retrieval, in turn, helped them to make sense of their spiritual struggles and construct new understandings of themselves and their ties to others—an undertaking not unlike that of more traditional conversion narratives in the early nineteenth century.²⁷ Such were the ambivalences inevitable to deconversion. This multifaceted process, according to Barbour, may include experiences of change involving radical doubt, moral revulsion from a way of life, emotional upheaval, and rejection of a community.²⁸ In the nineteenth century, the abandonment of traditional modes of evangelical piety was seldom unconscious because, in the ‘righteous empire’ of American Protestantism, it touched on so many aspects of everyday life. At places like the University of Michigan, spiritual journeys usually involved a series of painful decisions, heightened self-awareness, and a recurring need to construct personal narratives of turning from. Most studies of the Victorian crisis of faith have focused on intellectual causes or consequences of unbelief.²⁹ This study, however, will join with Barbour and others in highlighting both the public and the private, cognitive and non-cognitive implications of deconversion.

      An examination of unpublished letters and private journals suggests that the effort to turn from became a constituent part of a person’s everyday reality. The impulse to narrate perceived changes in thought and feeling was often expressed in only a few words or sentences interspersed among more mundane matters, perhaps in a weekly letter written to a distant mother. Or, in a moment of acute introspection, the impulse might provoke an explosion of writing, perhaps an entire letter or journal entry. Deconversion also factored heavily into the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships where the grounds for mutual acceptance or rejection were provided. Ultimately, the stage was set for a turning to new modes of being and action that served the needs of a vibrant academic community. The ambivalences associated with deconversion, however, continued to work their way into the vocations and intellectual products of a specific institutional milieu. At every level of inquiry, the autobiographical impulse offered practical opportunities to measure spiritual progress or regress, evaluate the pros and cons of new beliefs, and revise, when necessary, the story of oneself.³⁰

      The experience of deconversion was not unrelated to two broader arenas of late-nineteenth-century discourse concerning the relationship between head and heart: first, widely publicized discussions among prominent educators on the merits of university reform and, second, literary popularizations of the quintessential Victorian crisis of faith. While a handful of educational reformers in the late nineteenth century were eager to stage an outright revolution, most endeavored to maintain a degree of visible continuity in their religious policies and practices. Some struggled to preserve the old unity of truth in the design of the university curriculum, relying, at least in part, on an unstable foundation of intuitionist epistemology. Others imagined a more open-ended religion of humanity or divine revelation of science. Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of trend-setting Johns Hopkins University, spoke for many of his peers when he insisted that America’s advanced schools should continue to be avowedly Christian—not in a narrow or sectarian sense—but in the broad, open and inspiring sense of the Gospels.³¹ Higher education’s most aggressive reformer, Charles W. Eliot, believed that his own Harvard University would fulfill, if not exceed, the highest Christian aspirations as long as its constituents worked to achieve a synthesis of the best knowledge of God.³² Religion on campus had to adapt to modern realities, but only while the concerns of a diverse array of interested parties were taken into account. As with university reform, religious accommodation was the product of give-and-take, not administrative fiat. No president wanted to provoke the charge of indifference by vigilant parents and clergy. Nor could the lingering religious needs and expectations of students be ignored as the old collegiate mandate of in loco parentis adjusted to the less restrictive standards of university comportment. The modern university was still, for the most part, a fusing crucible for the young—a nurturing institution charged with the responsibility of completing the mental and spiritual training begun at home. Preserving this function while, at the same time, making profound adjustments in the content and scope of religion became, not surprisingly, a delicate task that involved administrators, faculty, and students alike.³³

      An even broader transatlantic arena of public discourse emerged concerning doubt, unbelief, agnosticism, and outright rejection of traditional Christianity. Just as the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had witnessed a prolific discussion of religious conversion, autobiographies published in the wake of the evangelical revival, especially in mid-Victorian England, began to dwell on the loss of faith and the questions which arise as individuals engage in the process of mourning.³⁴ Earlier conversion autobiographies had legitimated, in evocative terms, the independent choice for a particular mode of religious being and action.³⁵ More recent portrayals of the autonomous, albeit alienated, self were associated with the choice against traditional beliefs and practices. In North America, this new genre of literature was appreciated to the extent that it analyzed and explained religious feelings in plausible ways, offering models of and for reality. Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, for example, dramatized the crisis of faith so powerfully that Carlyle-isms like Everlasting No and the Center of Indifference began to appear routinely in ‘edifying’ periodicals sponsored by the nation’s cultural guardians as well as in the popular media of local campus papers.³⁶ Faculty and students at the University of Michigan devoured this literature and meditated, privately and in print, on its implications. But they also innovated on the themes and prescribed pathways of transformation—a testimony not only to the efficacy of published deconversion narratives during this period of rapid change but also to the inherent tensions that arise between the personal and the universal in all expressions of spiritual autobiography. The process of turning-from was still a complex transformation that varied in origin, intensity, and outcome with each individual and context.³⁷

      A close-up examination of the turning-from and turning-to aspects of religious change tells us a great deal about the motivations of a broad spectrum of individuals—not just leading administrators like James Angell, but also students and faculty who played their own distinctive roles in the disestablishment process. Since this transformation played itself out at a variety of levels and in a range of locales, a multi-perspectival approach is adopted throughout this investigation. In chapter one, a relatively thick slice of academic life provides an introduction to the University of Michigan during its most active phase of reform. Through at least the 1870s, public universities in the Midwest were accustomed to serving constituencies that were largely Protestant in composition but diverse in denominational identity.³⁸ Thus, Angell has often been quoted for his observation in 1877 that Michigan, being a Christian State, required that its university cherish a broad unsectarian but earnest Christian spirit.³⁹ This meant that Angell had to walk a fine line between a vague religious ethos and a more explicit brand of evangelical orthodoxy as he launched, in the name of university reform, one of the first completely voluntary religious programs in American higher education. Michigan provides an important case-study not only because it is, in the words of George Marsden, a prototype of the state research university, but also because it is of particular interest to historians who appreciate the complex rationale and unintended consequences of such disestablishment policies.⁴⁰

      Most importantly, chapter one identifies the evangelical ambivalences which animated and structured the individualized religious transformations discussed in subsequent chapters. In a general sense, these chapters comprise an over-arching deconversion narrative, beginning with the theme of turning-from associated with crises of faith (chapters two and three), and proceeding to the theme of turning-to, which accounts for the relational and vocational implications of early recuperative efforts (chapters four and five). Chapter six brings us back to the thicker social context

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