Last week, the Deseret News published an essay by Elder Clark Gilbert, the commissioner of CES. (Remember, CES is over the church’s secondary education system, including the BYUs and Pathways.) In it, he argues for the distinctive—and critical—role religiously-affiliated colleges and universities play in our broad network of secondary education.
And honestly, I found the essay deeply troubling.
Not, let me point out, because I disagree with Elder Gilbert’s premise. I’ve spent my entire academic career teaching at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. We’re a Jesuit school, and our sense of Jesuit identity is central to our mission and to the way we educate our students. This mission encourages us to center justice, as well as the well-being of our students, faculty, and staff. It motivates and permeates the education we provide.
But we don’t see a conflict between the delivery of a secular education and our mission to produce lawyers who will help transform the world.
Elder Gilbert starts his essay talking about being on the Harvard campus and looking at the library from the steps of the chapel. His takeaway? Faith and reason at Harvard were in conflict, with reason the inevitable winner.
But here’s the thing: he doesn’t provide any evidence—any suggestion, even—that anybody but him has had that reaction. Yes, Harvard is a secular university. And it has a world-renowned divinity school. It has a beautiful chapel on campus. (And I’ll note here that BYU-Provo does not have a chapel on campus.) And it produces graduates who are deeply religious.
Elder Gilbert contrasted his Harvard experience with his BYU experience. And that’s probably what troubles me most: somehow his BYU experience left him with the belief that faith and reason were incompatible and stood in contrast to each other. Somehow his BYU experience led him to believe that Harvard detracted from faith, not because of any affirmative attack on faith, but because it wasn’t religiously affiliated.
So yes, I strongly believe that religiously-affiliated colleges and universities play an important part in the constellation of secondary education. I also believe that secular universities do. And I believe that you can find and nurture faith at secular institutions and that you can lose faith at religious institutions.
But I think it is absolutely critical that we—and especially the head of a network of religious universities—not give in to, and not promote, a vision where faith and reason are inevitably locked in conflict. Because that’s not the world we live in.
Image by Crimson400. CC BY-SA 3.0